Cancer research under the microscope

Cancer studies 'wasted millions'

Millions of pounds of charity donations and taxpayers' money have been wasted on worthless cancer studies, the BBC has learned...t found some scientists have failed to carry out simple and inexpensive checks to ensure they are working with the right forms of human tumour cells. One of the latest examples of scientific research to be affected by this problem is a study of oesophageal cancer. Researcher Dr Chris Tselepis worked with an international team which has found that TE7, an experimental culture of cancer cells used in labs for the past 20 years, was the wrong cancer...

The problem is compounded by the fact that studies based on erroneous research data will be printed in reputable scientific journals and become part of the accepted literature, thus misleading future researchers.