An independent researcher has uncovered potential blunder in scores of scientific studies, including cancer-related research, as a result of inappropriate antibody use in laboratory experiments, raising questions about the reliability of some of the results published in prestigious scientific journals. The researcher found that scientists at Cambridge, Oxford, Stanford and other universities appear to have accidentally used the wrong ingredient in their experiments, muddling two proteins with similar names but entirely different sequences and functions. Several British media outlets said researcher Sholto David reviewed the full text of 334 research papers to determine whether the antibody used in the studies was correctly intended for p16-ARC or incorrectly used to try and bind p16-INK4a. P16-INK4a acts as a tumor suppressor by halting the cell cycle and is widely studied in cancer biology and is considered a key biomarker of ageing. He found astonishing result: 95% of these papers have got it wrong. “The vast majority of researchers who purchased antibodies have tried to use them to investigate p16-INK4a expression. Only 17 used these p16-ARC antibodies correctly,” he said in his research. David said the implications are not good, to put it mildly. “And these are not just insignificant papers. There are papers with hundreds of citations in high impact journals claiming to probe for p16-INK4a with antibodies which do not bind p16-INK4a,” he noted.
