Researchers from across the biomedical research community met in October to discuss solutions to the 'irreproducibility epidemic', which has been re-emphasized by new data from Novartis and Sigma-Aldrich.
One result that the scientific community has consistently reproduced in recent years is the finding that a vast body of biomedical research is irreproducible. Yet, while scientists at Bayer, Amgen, the ALS Therapy Development Institute and elsewhere have documented the 'irreproducibility epidemic', few organizations have come up with demonstrated solution.
So, in October, leading experts from universities, industry, the US government and journals gathered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, for the first major, multi-stakeholder symposium dedicated to tackling biomedical irreproducibility.
“For the first time people are coming together to talk about it,” says Sitta Sittampalam, a senior advisor at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH)'s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) in Bethesda, Maryland, USA. “On the one hand, it's depressing to hear about all of this. But on the other, solutions are starting to crop up.”
Various nascent initiatives were discussed — and broadly welcomed — at the symposium. But these efforts aren't enough on their own to mitigate the problem, says Barbara Slusher, Director of the Brain Science Institute Drug Discovery Program at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. “Right now there are no negative consequences to publishing something that's irreproducible,” she says. “The incentive programme in academia really needs to have some shifts.” A pharma veteran of 18 years, Slusher also directs the Academic Drug Discovery Consortium (ADDC), a non-profit network of more than 100 research centres worldwide (Nature Rev. Drug Discov. 12, 811–812; 2013).
No comments:
Post a Comment