This week's Hudson seminar will be held in
Seminar Rooms 1 & 2, Level 2, TRF Building
on Thursday 26th April 12pm-1pm.
Our speaker will be Dr C. Glenn Begley MB BS PhD FRACP
FRCPA FRCPath FAHMS;
CEO of BioCurate Pty Ltd.
He will be presenting 'Challenges facing Translational Research
across the Yarra, and around the World'
As medical researchers, we all want
to make a difference. We all want to make discoveries that have a real
impact on human health. There are however many obstacles to achieving this
goal.
In an effort to address some of
these, Monash University and the University of Melbourne have created an
independent company, BioCurate charged with taking the medical research from
the two Universities and translating that research into therapeutics of
clinical and commercial value.
Over the last 6 months, BioCurate
has had the privilege of reviewing over 50 research projects. Those reviews
have revealed themes common to academic research worldwide.
Unfortunately, however, the rewards
that currently apply within the worldwide academic system provide a perverse
set of incentives that reward flashy science with little regard for the
quality, robustness or reliability of the work. That is particularly the
case for papers published in the “top tier” journals. In this presentation, I
will review and ‘dissect’ several high profiles, highly cited publications that
illustrate the problem. These highly cited publications, from famous
investigators and their laboratories, typically fail because experiments were
not performed by blinded investigators, positive and negative controls were not
used, experiments were not repeated, reagents were not validated, only select
data was shown, and data analysis was inappropriate.
This is a systemic problem and
guarantees that a focus on rigour and reproducibility at the very heart of the
BioCurate’s endeavours.
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