Wednesday, December 08, 2021

Study can't confirm/reproduce lab results for about 50% of cancer experiments

Very concerning!

Can we expect similar devastating results for other areas of medicine? How about SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19?

The wild west of science! Scientists are all too human!

"Eight years ago, a team of researchers launched a project to carefully repeat early but influential lab experiments in cancer research.

They recreated 50 experiments, the type of preliminary research with mice and test tubes that sets the stage for new cancer drugs. The results reported Tuesday: About half the scientific claims didn’t hold up. ...
For the project, the researchers tried to repeat experiments from cancer biology papers published from 2010 to 2012 in major journals such as Cell, Science and Nature.
Overall, 54% of the original findings failed to measure up to statistical criteria set ahead of time by the Reproducibility Project, according to the team’s study published online Tuesday by eLife. The nonprofit eLife receives funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute ...
Often, they couldn’t get help from the scientists who did the original work when they had questions about which strain of mice to use or where to find specially engineered tumor cells.
... it is concerning that about a third of scientists were not helpful, and, in some cases, were beyond not helpful,” ..."

Study can't confirm lab results for many cancer experiments | AP News


Investigating the replicability of preclinical cancer biology (open access, it is not clear whether this study was peer reviewed)

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