Over 30,000 Published Studies Could Be Wrong Due To Contaminated Cells (sciencealert.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Alert: Researchers warn that large parts of biomedical science could be invalid due to a cascading history of flawed data in a systemic failure going back decades. A new investigation reveals more than 30,000 published scientific studies could be compromised by their use of misidentified cell lines, owing to so-called immortal cells contaminating other research cultures in the lab. The problem is as serious as it is simple: researchers studying lung cancer publish a new paper, only it turns out the tissue they were actually using in the lab were liver cells. Or what they thought were human cells were mice cells, or vice versa, or something else entirely. If you think that sounds bad, you're right, as it means the findings of each piece of affected research may be flawed, and could even be completely unreliable.

Horback and fellow researcher Willem Halffman wanted to know how extensive the phenomenon of misidentified cell lines really was, so they searched for evidence of what they call "contaminated" scientific literature. Using the research database Web of Science, they looked for scientific articles based on any of the known misidentified cell lines as listed by the International Cell Line Authentication Committee's (ICLAC) Register of Misidentified Cell Lines.There are currently 451 cell lines on this list, and they're not what you think they are -- having been contaminated by other kinds of cells at some point in scientific history. Worse still, they've been unwittingly used in published laboratory research going as far back as the 1950s.

Comments

Re:30000 out of how many

[Anonymous Coward]

0,8% - the paper is open access if you want the details.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0186281

Re:This is beyond hard to believe

[pesho]

It is a problem that has been known for a long time. Initially we lacked tests to validate the origin of the cell lines. Now we have an established panel of markers that can be used to cheaply and reliably confirm the identity of cell lines. The National Institute of Health, which is the major funding source for biomedical research in the US, requires all funding applications to have a plan for authenticating biological materials including cell lines.

Most of the literature using misidentified cell lines is probably old, although there are still people doing research who are either oblivious to the issue or just don't care. I think the conclusion that all these studies are invalid is an overstatement. Many if not most of these works are likely investigating fundamental biological processes that would be the same regardless of the cell line. The studies that are questionable would be the ones relying on the cell line fatefully preserving the characteristics of the original cell, like studies trying to develop therapies for various diseases or investigating processes carried out by specialized cell types.

There are many other problems that are associated with cell lines that I would think are more serious than the mis-authentication. For starters cells change when they are placed in the dish and loose many of the important characteristics of the originating cell. This means people need to be really careful when deciding if a particular experiment can be done on a cell line. Then there are examples of low level microbial contamination that goes unnoticed by the people growing the cells, but can clearly be detected in gene expression data if you look for it (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4239086/ if you look at figure 2 of the paper you can see that some labs are consistently sloppy). There is also a host of technical issues that can impact the conclusions of cell line studies ranging from the quality and source of reagents, to the experience of the staff and the techniques used to maintain the cells. These tend to vary a lot across labs and rarely documented in the publications.