Newswise — On Tuesday, February 9, at 12:00 noon EST, Global Biological Standards Institute (GBSI) will host its 2016 BioPolicy Summit at the Newseum in Washington, DC. The 2016 Summit—Research Reproducibility: Innovative Solutions to Drive Quality welcomes premiere life science thought leaders as speakers, panelists and guests who will review the complex causes of irreproducibility and focus on tangible solutions to drive greater research quality and accelerate the discovery of life-saving therapies.

The Summit will also introduce GBSI’s Reproducibility2020, an action plan for the biomedical research community to significantly improve the quality of research by 2020 targeting: 1) improved validation and standardization of biological reagents; 2) better tools and technologies to expand open access for reporting and sharing protocols and data; and 3) increased training that emphasizes rigorous study design and practice.

Panelists will identify calls-to-action for attendees to implement in their own areas of expertise to bring about change in the development of biomedical research standards and best practices. A question and answer session will provide attendees the opportunity to further probe the insights and contributions of presenters and offer their own perspective. 

Advances in life science research are based on the quality, reproducibility and translatability of published data and findings. Yet irreproducibility in preclinical research is pervasive and contributes to delays and costs in therapeutic drug development and reduced trust in the biomedical research process. Myriad factors lead to irreproducibility; solutions will result in more cost-effective research and accelerate the discovery of diagnostics and treatments that can save lives. 

Media are invited to RSVP to attend the Summit by emailing [email protected]. A live webcast will be available for those who would like to participate remotely.   PROGRAM & DETAILS:

Registration and Lunch Buffet (11:30 p.m.)

Welcome (12:00 noon): Leonard P. Freedman PhD, President, Global Biological Standards Institute

Keynote presenter: Judith Kimble, PhD, Vilas Professor of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Medical Genetics and Cell and Regenerative Biology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute will cover the broader challenges around reproducibility in research. Panel (12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.)Moderator:  Richard Harris, award-winning journalist and Science Correspondent, National Public Radio. Currently on leave, he is writing a book about rigor and reproducibility in biomedical science, and he’s a visiting scholar at Arizona State University. The panel features:• Arturo Casadevall, MD, PhD, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, Alfred and Jill Sommer Professor and Chair, Professor, Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Casadevall has analyzed the errors in literature and published the spectrum of errors found in retractions—ranging from obvious fraud, to systematic problems between cell lines, regents and antibodies that act synergistically. He’ll discuss ideas about revamping PhD programs to train people differently, and improvements to reproducibility rates without sacrificing discovery through the creative process.Amy Herr, PhD, Lester John & Lynne Dewar Lloyd Distinguished Professor, Department of Bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Herr works at the intersection of microsystems engineering and analytical chemistry and is interested in development of direct measurements of molecules, especially proteins and single cells. She is focused on the need for an organized, formal process for standards-based training for graduate students, as soon as they enter the university setting.Joshua LaBaer, MD, PhD, Director, Virginia G. Piper Center for Personalized Diagnostics, Virginia G. Piper Chair of Personal Medicine, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, The BioDesign Institute at Arizona State University. An international leader in the area of proteomics, LaBaer was an early initiator of the effort to build fully sequence-verified recombination-based clone sets for human genes and other model organisms now managed in an automated repository with more than 250,000 samples, which are openly shared with the scientific community. He is also focused on how the lack of SOPs during sample procurement, including procurement of human tissues, can generate tremendous variations in data that are generated from such samples.Brian Nosek, PhD, Professor, Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia; Executive Director of the Center for Open Science. In the biggest project of its kind, Nosek and 269 co-authors recently repeated work reported in 98 original papers from three psychology journals, to see if they came up with the same results. Only 39 of the 100 replication attempts were successful. Nosek fundamentally agrees that there is value in creativity, but he's advocating a system that is more organized, and so by definition, more regimented. He would like to distinguish between experiments that are exploratory as opposed to confirmatory. He believes that without a clear intent from start to finish in a study, statistics may be underpowered and the end product may be a new but irreproducible result.Timothy Simcoe, PhD, Associate Professor of Strategy & Innovation, Questrom School of Business at Boston University. Simcoe is an economist working on science and innovation policy. He can share how, in other fields, leaders have grown toward a consensus set of practices that everyone adopts. Different stakeholders involved in the biomedical field (journals, funders, scientists) will need to agree on a set of best practices or standards on which they could ultimately be audited. He can also share insights about the year he just worked in Washington at the Council of Economic Advisors where he interacted with OSTP, and the current administration's push toward transparency and open access in data.

Simcoe and Freedman can both answer questions about the provocative paper they co-authored and published in PLOS with Iain M. Cockburn PhD last year, The Economics of Reproducibility in Preclinical Research— in terms of what the authors’ intent in quantifying the cost of irreproducibility was, and what they found.

Q&A: (1:30 p.m.) 

Closing Remarks (before 2:00 p.m.): Leonard Freedman

DETAILS: Date: Tuesday, February 9, 2016; 12 to 2 p.m. EST (lunch buffet at 11:30 a.m.)Location: The Newseum, Knight Conference Center 555 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20001Contact: Carol Miller at email: [email protected] or phone:  202-306-0130  Nancy Retherford at email: [email protected] or phone: 317-460-6838

About Global Biological Standards Institute (GBSI)GBSI, a non-profit organization, is dedicated to enhancing the quality of biomedical research by advocating best practices and standards to accelerate the translation of research breakthroughs into life-saving therapies. For more information, visit GBSI.org; Twitter @GBSIorg.