Half of Top Cancer Studies Fail High-Profile Reproducibility Effort
An Anonymous Coward writes:
Half of top cancer studies fail high-profile reproducibility effort
A US$2-million, 8-year attempt to replicate influential preclinical cancer research papers has released its final - and disquieting - results. Fewer than half of the experiments assessed stood up to scrutiny, reports the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology (RPCB) team in eLife. The project - one of the most robust reproducibility studies performed so far - documented how hurdles including vague research protocols and uncooperative authors delayed the initiative by five years and halved its scope.
"These results aren't surprising. And, simultaneously, they're shocking," says Brian Nosek, an RPCB investigator and executive director of the Center for Open Science in Charlottesville, Virginia. Although initially planning to repeat 193 experiments from 53 papers, the team ran just 50 experiments from 23 papers.
The low replication rate is "frankly, outrageous", says Glenn Begley, an oncologist and co-founder of Parthenon Therapeutics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was not involved in the study. But it isn't unexpected, he agrees. In 2012, while at the biotech firm Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California, Begley's team helped to draw attention to growing evidence of a 'reproducibility crisis', the concern that many research findings cannot be replicated. Over the previous decade, his haematology and oncology team had been able to confirm the results of only 6 of the 53 (11%) landmark papers it assessed, despite working alongside the papers' original authors.
Other analyses have reported low replication rates in drug discovery, neuroscience and psychology.
Journal Reference:
Asher Mullard. Half of top cancer studies fail high-profile reproducibility effort, (DOI: 10.1038/d41586-021-03691-0)
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.