npr | Laboratory research seeking new medical treatments and cures is
fraught with pitfalls: Researchers can inadvertently use bad
ingredients, design the experiment poorly, or conduct inadequate data
analysis. Scientists working on ways to reduce these sorts of problems
have put a staggering price tag on research that isn't easy to
reproduce: $28 billion a year.
That figure, published Tuesday in the journal PLOS Biology,
represents about half of all the preclinical medical research that's
conducted in labs (in contrast to research on human volunteers). And the
finding comes with some important caveats.
The $28 billion
doesn't just represent out-and-out waste, the team that did the research
cautions. It also includes some studies that produced valid results —
but that couldn't be repeated by others because of the confusing way the
methods were described, or because of other shortcomings.
Leonard Freedman,
who heads a nonprofit called the Global Biological Standards Institute,
decided to undertake the study with two Boston University economists, Iain Cockburn and Timothy Simcoe. Their goal was to identify ways to make research more efficient.
"We initially were asking a very simple question," Freeman says.
"We simply wanted to know how much money is being spent each year on
basic preclinical research that is not reproducible."
That
turned out to be a very difficult question; only a few studies have
addressed the issue head-on, and they aren't directly comparable. The
economists eventually homed in on a best estimate: $28 billion per year.
