TY - JOUR TI - Is preclinical research in cancer biology reproducible enough? AU - Kane, Patrick Bodilly AU - Kimmelman, Jonathan A2 - Rodgers, Peter VL - 10 PY - 2021 DA - 2021/12/07 SP - e67527 C1 - eLife 2021;10:e67527 DO - 10.7554/eLife.67527 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.67527 AB - 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? KW - Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology KW - replication KW - preclinical research KW - clinical trials KW - false negatives KW - reproducibility JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -