The lack of replicability of scientific results obtained in preclinical animal trials has been well studied over the last two decades. It is a real problem with real consequences. How can one expect that preclinical results will translate into clinical therapies when there is a certain lack of validity in the underlying preclinical research to begin with?
Various contributing factors for the observed lack of reproducibility have been described, including publication bias, experimental design issues, insufficient rigor in the application of statistical methodology and unexpected negative effects of too much standardization, just to name a few.
In spite of a fairly good understanding of the various problems contributing to reproducibility issues there exists much less evidence on strategies how to overcome these difficulties. This workshop should provide a platform for researches, who are confronted with these questions in their every-day business. Five different talks will present ideas and recent developments, which could help to advance preclinical research.
The target audience includes all researchers, who are involved in planning and conducting preclinical animal trials. Both on Thursday and on Friday the sessions will conclude with penal discussions, which will allow participants of the workshop to articulate their own view and to discuss the possibility of actually implementing changes in their own research.
Programme
Thursday
- 13:00 | Opening
- 13:10 | Florian Frommlet: “The problem of pre-planned replications in animal experiments.”
- 14:00 | Vanessa von Kortzfleisch: „At the edge of standardisation – strategies to embrace variation and improve reproducibility in animal research”
- 14:45 | Coffee Break
- 15:10 | Natasha Karp: “Implementing the paradigm shift to generalisable results – a story about batch”
- 16:00 | Panel Discussion
Friday
- 09:00 | David Berry: “Microbiome variability in animal research: Causes, consequences, solutions, and opportunities”
- 09:50 | Ulf Toelch: „What can we learn from replications in translational biomedicine?”
- 10:40 | Coffee Break
- 11:00 | Panel Discussion
Technical implementation in cooperation with Vivian Ruschak