Abstract
Background: Lack of reproducibility in preclinical research poses ethical and economic challenges for biomedical science. Various institutional activities by society stakeholders of leading industrialised nations are currently underway with the aim of improving the situation. Such initiatives are usually concerned with high-level organisational issues and typically do not focus on improving experimental approaches per se. Addressing these is necessary in order to increase consistency and success rates of lab-to-lab repetitions. Methods: In this project, we statistically evaluated repetitive data of a very basic and widely applied lab procedure, namely quantifying the number of viable cells. The purpose of this was to assess the impact of different parameters and instrumentations which may constitute sources of variance in this procedure. Conclusion: By comparing the variability of data acquired under two different procedures, featuring improved stringency of protocol adherence, our project attempts to identify the sources and propose guidelines on how to reduce such fluctuations. We believe our work can contribute to tackling the repeatability crisis in biomedical research.
Highlights
In vitro work is the fundament of every wet lab project, in academic research as well as in industry product development
Some areas of biomedical research suffer from insufficient success rates to replicate or repeat core findings of previous observations
Improved and increased standardization in wet lab research is suggested as a powerful strategy to increase repeatability.[3,9,5]
Summary
In vitro work is the fundament of every wet lab project, in academic research as well as in industry product development. A survey amongst scientists recently highlighted that the community is well aware of this problem, and confirmed that personal experiences with this issue are common.[11,2,12] A standard in vitro method for drug development or genetic studies is the quantification of cellular growth over time, under different micro-environmental conditions For this basic assay, on which to some extent almost all of today’s successful substances used in oncology are based, inconsistencies have been noticed when trying to repeat research results.[8,6,13] In response this this, leading science organizations, in cooperation with respective policy makers, scientific publishing houses, and other society stakeholders, have initiated institutionally funded campaigns to tackle these issues, such as the cancer reproducibility project, to mention only one.[4,15] improved and increased standardization in wet lab research is suggested as a powerful strategy to increase repeatability.[3,9,5]. We believe our work can contribute to tackling the repeatability crisis in biomedical research
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