OnCo
ideasIdea

Every cancer biology PhD begins with a funded replication of a published finding

Make the first project of every doctoral student a careful, published attempt to repeat an important result. Students learn rigour, and the field gets thousands of replications a year.

First-year doctoral students need training projects with clear methods and a defined endpoint; replications provide exactly that, while teaching pre-registration, power analysis, blinding and reporting. Programmes that have tried this (in psychology) report strong educational outcomes. A cancer biology version, with findings chosen from a curated list of translationally important results and outcomes published in a replication registry, would create a steady replication workforce at marginal cost.

Hypothesis
Participating programmes will publish at least one replication per student, and students will show measurably better methodological practice in subsequent thesis work than matched controls.
Rationale
Training and replication are complementary: the student gains skills, the field gains evidence, and the incentive problem is sidestepped because the student is not competing for novelty.
What would test it
Pilot in five doctoral programmes for three cohorts; track replications published and assess later methodological quality.
Maturity
speculative
Who has to act
research
Cost to try
Medium ($1M to $50M)
Years to first evidence
4
Bottlenecks it attacks

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ideas

2
A replication status badge on every cancer paper, visible in PubMedFunders set aside a fixed share of budget for independent replication

bottlenecks

2
Not enough oncologists, nurses, pathologists, physicistsPreclinical results do not reproduce