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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.
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.
What percentage of published studies are affected? Sure, 30,000 seems like a ton, and if there is critical work in there it is certainly bad, but if this is 30,000 out of 300 million or some arbitrarily large number of studies, it isn't as catastrophic as the headline suggests.
This is Henrietta's revenge. That is what scientists get for stealing her cells in the first place!
This has been known for a while, but perhaps not broadly known, and not by "the general public". The link to the ICLAC in TFS is evidence of that.
The actual paper will answer your questions, but briefly: people make mistakes in maintaining cell lines, and contamination is easier than you think, particularly in primary cell lines.
I didn't see the authors mention if reproducibility sorts this out, if someone can't reproduce the results in another cell line or in an animal model, the original results are considered context dependent.