Replication failures cast doubt on some cancer studies

A decade-long project that attempted to replicate experiments from several high-profile papers in the field of preclinical cancer biology has found that around half of the experiments couldn’t be replicated on most criteria.

‘This suggests the credibility of published findings in cancer biology are less certain than thought,’ said Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science, which oversaw the project.

The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology, launched in 2012 in an attempt to replicate 193 experiments from 53 high-impact papers published between 2010 and 2012, selected based on citations and readership. But a lack of transparency about data, reagents and protocols by some authors of the original papers meant that in the end just 50 experiments from 23 papers were completed, said Tim Errington, director of research at the Center for Open Science and the project’s leader.