Science Forum: Is preclinical research in cancer biology reproducible enough?

The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology (RPCB) was established to provide evidence about reproducibility in basic and preclinical cancer research, and to identify the factors that influence reproducibility more generally. In this commentary we address some of the scientific, ethical and policy implications of the project. We liken the basic and preclinical cancer research enterprise to a vast 'diagnostic machine' that is used to determine which clinical hypotheses should be advanced for further development, including clinical trials. The results of the RPCB suggest that this diagnostic machine currently recommends advancing many findings that are not reproducible. While concerning, we believe that more work needs to be done to evaluate the performance of the diagnostic machine. Specifically, we believe three questions remain unanswered: how often does the diagnostic machine correctly recommend against advancing real effects to clinical testing?; what are the relative costs to society of false positive and false negatives?; and how well do scientists and others interpret the outputs of the machine?

Automated summary

The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology aims to provide evidence on reproducibility in cancer research and identify factors influencing reproducibility. Results suggest the current diagnostic machine in cancer research recommends many non-reproducible findings for further advancement, raising concerns. However, further evaluation is needed, with unanswered questions on the machine's accuracy, societal costs of false positives and negatives, and interpretation of its outputs by scientists and others.