Recognition of observer effect is required for rigor and reproducibility of preclinical animal studies

Abstract

Rigor and reproducibility in animal experimentation are of great concern for the scientific community, and this has recently been addressed by the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH: http://acd.od.nih.gov/working-groups/eprar.html). A timely example was recently published by Grzelak et al. in Cancer Cell, where they reemphasized how immunogenicity of xenobiotic marker genes can distort the outcome of experiments that involve murine cancer cell lines implanted into syngeneic immunocompetent hosts.