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[In Depth] Mixed results from cancer replications unsettle field

ScienceNOW - Fetched: January 19th, 2017, 3:00pm UTC

The first results of a high-profile effort to replicate dozens of influential papers in cancer biology are roiling the biomedical community. Of the five studies the project has tackled so far, some involving experimental treatments already in clinical trials, only two could be repeated; one could not, and technical problems stymied the remaining two replication efforts. Some scientists say these early findings from the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology, which appear this week in eLife, bolster concerns that too many basic biomedical studies don't hold up in other labs. But others say the results simply show that good studies can be hard to precisely reproduce, because biological systems are so variable. Author: Jocelyn Kaiser

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