ideasIdea

Prove the cell line is what you say it is, or the paper does not run

A troubling share of published cancer experiments use cell lines that are contaminated or mislabelled. Requiring a simple identity check before publication would stop this.

Short tandem repeat profiling costs little and detects misidentification and cross-contamination, yet compliance is patchy. Mandatory deposition of STR profiles (and, for patient-derived models, low-pass sequencing confirming donor identity and drift) at submission, checked automatically against the register of misidentified lines, would remove a known and fully solvable source of irreproducibility. Some journals already require it; enforcement is inconsistent.

Hypothesis

Mandatory automated authentication checking at submission reduces the proportion of published oncology papers using misidentified lines to under 1 percent within three years.

Rationale

Cell-line misidentification is one of the few reproducibility problems with a cheap, definitive test and an existing reference database; the failure is purely one of enforcement.

What would test it

Two major journals implement automated checking for one year; measure rejection or correction rate and compare with matched journals that do not.

Maturity

preclinical evidence

Who has to act

policy

Cost to try

Small (under $1M)

Years to first evidence

Bottlenecks it attacks

Preclinical models that do not predict people · Nine in ten cancer drugs that work in mice fail in humans. Our models are the reason.
Preclinical results do not reproduce · Fewer than half of landmark cancer biology findings reproduce when someone else tries.

Connected

2top

Pages like this

not linked directly; found by shared links

bottlenecks

Preclinical models that do not predict people Preclinical results do not reproduce