Flutterby™! : Cancer studies irreproducible 2012-03-31 01:10:39.799019+02

Cancer studies irreproducible

2012-03-31 01:10:39.799019+02 by Dan Lyke 1 comments

C. Glenn Begley, former head of global cancer research at Amgen, led a team to try to replicate 53 "landmark" cancer studies/publications, and they couldn't duplicate the results of 47 of them:

"It was shocking," said Begley, now senior vice president of privately held biotechnology company TetraLogic, which develops cancer drugs. "These are the studies the pharmaceutical industry relies on to identify new targets for drug development. But if you're going to place a $1 million or $2 million or $5 million bet on an observation, you need to be sure it's true. As we tried to reproduce these papers we became convinced you can't take anything at face value."

Via MeFi. Here's Drug development: Raise standards for preclinical cancer research, C. Glenn Begley & Lee M. Ellis, in Nature.

To me it raises new doubts and concerns as to how far we've truly come with cancer treatments and cures.

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