WIKIMEDIA, NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTHAs part of the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology, independent teams of researchers attempt to replicate the experiments in a few dozen highly cited papers published from 2010 to 2012. They’ve already reported the results of replicating five papers, and today (June 27), the results from re-doing the experiments of two more papers were posted in eLife, this time largely confirming the same conclusions as the original authors.
In one study, replicators copied the experiments from a 2011 Nature paper in which researchers used a drug to impede the growth of leukemia cells. In both studies, the inhibitor worked for a particular cell line and not another, yet unlike the original study, the replication attempt did not see increased survival in treated mice.
“Differences between the original study and this replication attempt, such as different conditioning regimens and doses [of the drug], are factors that might have influenced the outcome,” the replication team writes in its report.
Tony Kouzarides of the University of Cambridge who led the original Nature study, tells ScienceInsider that the discrepancy between the two attempts “highlights the pitfalls of biological research, namely, that different labs may vary conditions that ...
