Project engineering

Robustness and experimental reproducibility

In order to be considered ethical, any research using animals for scientific purposes must generate robust results, with a strong impact on knowledge, health and safety of humans or animals. Project engineering can improve the quality of scientific results and conclusions while reducing or even replacing the use of animals

The difficulty in reproducing results is a concern in science, especially from the perspective of the 3Rs. As early as 2005, John Ioannidis warned about the reproducibility and replicability of results in the article Why most published research findings are false. In 2016, a survey of 1,500 scientists published in Nature indicated that over 70% of researchers were unable to replicate published results. More recently, Ross King's lab came out with a study on the reproducibility and robustness of published findings in cancer. A meta-analysis of 12,260 articles, performed using artificial intelligence, selected 72 findings of interest to biomedical research and showed that less than one-third are reproducible using a robotic approach.

Reproducibility can be improved by understanding the variability that must be taken into account in the experimental design. This requires, among other things, the availability of metadata concerning, in the case of the animal, the environment (noise, light, circadian rhythm, temperature, humidity, stress, housing systems), the food, the care given to the animals, their microbiota, the sanitary quality, the genetic quality of the animals, the sex, the age, the transportation, etc.

Doing more and better with less

Applying the 3Rs principle in a project is a complex task. How to integrate the 3Rs in an efficient and cost-effective way in an experimental project? What to replace an animal model with? How to do more analysis with fewer animals? How to better respect the animal? How to reconcile these different aspects while generating significant, reproducible and robust results?

In short, how to do more and better with less?

Project engineering provides helpful solutions to these problems, by enabling projects to be split into several quantifiable and controllable, or even replaceable, steps. This ranges from the study of the adequacy of the model, animal or not, to answer a scientific question, to the writing of articles and the dissemination of data. Guides, checklists and websites dedicated to this type of project management already exist. They are in constant evolution and improvement.

FC3R gathers and structures all the information and resources useful for project management. They will soon be available on the website.