29 June 2021

In February 2013, Dr. H. Shaw Warren, then a sepsis researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, was interviewed by Gina Kolata, a reporter at the New York Times about the difficulties his research group had encountered while attempting to publish a specific paper. What was the main objection raised by reviewers for various journals, including Science and Nature? The fact that the study demonstrated that mice were very poor models for mimicking human inflammatory diseases. As Dr. Warren commented, “They [the reviewers] were so used to doing mouse studies that they thought that was how you validate things.” [Read more…]

22 June 2021

by Marcia Triunfol

Prof. Dr Hans Clevers is one of the pioneers in the research of adult stem cells and the developer of the first organoids (self-organizing three-dimensional tissue cultures derived from stem cells). A scientist at the University of Utrecht in The Netherlands, Prof. Dr Clevers believes that, for biomedical research, the shift from animal models to adoption of human-relevant approaches is well underway. In his lab only 10% of the experiments currently underway are animal-based and most of the new projects rely on technologies that are not done in vivo but instead use models such as organoids. [Read more…]

A study of media coverage of 623 scientific papers on Alzheimer’s disease research conducted in mice reveals that the digital news media are more likely to write a story about alleged breakthroughs or medical research findings if research authors omit mice from their studies’ titles. On the other hand, papers that acknowledge mice in their titles result in limited media coverage.

In addition, the study titled “What’s not in the news headlines or titles of Alzheimer disease articles? #Inmice”conducted by Dr Marcia Triunfol of Humane Society International and Dr Fabio Gouveia of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Brazil, and published in PLoS Biology, found that the resulting media coverage generated by papers with “missing mice” titles is also more likely to omit mice from their headlines.

This is of concern because scientific findings obtained from animal experiments should be reported with caution due to their limited relevance to human health. The biology and physiology of mice and other animals differ significantly to that of humans, such that research results obtained in animals often fail to be replicated in people. Despite that, the scientific value of articles downplaying that they relied on animal models is actually inflated by their disproportionate media exposure, raising concerns that the public and patients are being misled.

Dr Triunfol, one of the study’s authors and Humane Society International’s scientific advisor, says: “There are around 200 animal models to study Alzheimer’s disease, and yet the vast majority of potential treatments discovered through experiments on mice are ineffective when tested in humans. Despite this significant flaw in the animal models, we show that articles glossing over the fact that the results were obtained using animals are given increased visibility and therefore implied credibility by the media. The reporting of animal research needs to be addressed with far greater caution and more prominent disclaimers in mainstream media to ensure the public understands that the results of animal experiments may have little to no relevance to human patients.” [Read more…]

23 April 2021

Publication bias: the problem that won’t go away. That’s the title of a 1993 study by Kay Dickersin, then at the Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and Yuan-I Min at the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins University. In their study, published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, the two authors define publication bias as “any tendency on the parts of investigators or editors to fail to publish study results on the basis of the direction or strength of the study findings.” More than 25 years later, not only is the problem of publication bias as they defined it still with us, it has metamorphosized into new forms.

Currently, publication bias is recognized as the preference of journals for publishing studies with positive results while rejecting those with negative ones. According to the Catalogue of Bias, a database that defines and lists examples of more than 10 different types of biases in health sciences, publication bias happens “when the likelihood of a study being published is affected by the findings of the study.” In a variant form, publication bias favors publication of papers distorted by spin that impacts their findings or interpretations. Spin might include manipulation of figures, selective reporting of outcomes, among others.

[Read more…]

2 March 2021

The extraordinary proliferation of scientific research prompted by the global pandemic has brought the need for advanced systems for organizing scientific information into focus. To address this pressing need, Humane Society International joined the innovative crowd-sourcing CIAO project (“Modelling the Pathogenesis of COVID-19 using the Adverse Outcome Pathway framework”), working in cooperation with the European Joint Research Center, the Karolinska Institute and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

COVID-19 has proven to be a great challenge for medicine, especially with respect to the urgency of efforts to understand its underlying biological processes and the complex range of patient outcomes dependent on so many external factors.

CIAO is a global effort to systematize the wealth of knowledge now accumulating on SARS-CoV-2, give it structure, meaning and accessibility, and maximize its utility to researchers and clinicians worldwide, enabling stakeholders to avoid duplication of research and accelerate progress to develop treatments and vaccines.

In 2020 alone, scientific efforts to fight the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in tens of thousands of papers published. This deluge of information has to some extent overwhelmed researchers, effectively hampering their ability to sift through results, retrieve critical and valuable information, and integrate their findings into a coherent, intelligible and broader structure. [Read more…]