Cancer reproducibility project releases first results

The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology launched in 2013 as an ambitious effort to scrutinize key findings in 50 cancer papers published in Nature, Science, Cell and other high-impact journals. It aims to determine what fraction of influential cancer biology studies are probably sound — a pressing question for the field. In 2012, researchers at the biotechnology firm Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California, announced that they had failed to replicate 47 of 53 landmark cancer papers2. That was widely reported, but Amgen has not identified the studies involved.