University Of Sydney Student Discovers Critical Flaw In Global Cancer Research

A study by an undergraduate student at the University Of Sydney is questioning the legitimacy of many academic cancer research papers.

Study in Australia: Animal science student Danielle Oste at the University Of Sydney undertook a group research project under the guidance of Professor Jennifer Byrne, from the School of Medical Sciences. She took part in the group research project as part of the Dalyell Scholars stream.

For her, this project would lead to the phantom cell lines discovery questioning the legitimacy of many academic cancer research papers. Cell lines are a group of cells taken from tissue and grown in the laboratory. They keep the basic functions and traits of the original cells. During her project, Danielle and her team found that many cell lines whose references were given in the research papers could not be verified in a well-known cell line encyclopedia - Cellosaurus.

“If a paper stated that it used MCF7, a breast cancer cell line, we would then search for MCF7 in Cellosaurus to verify that it was indeed a breast cancer cell line. Through this process we came across five that just didn't come up in this database and at the time we were like ‘oh, that's a bit weird’. So, what started as this niggling weird thing in a group project assignment, pretty quickly grew into what was quite a scary discovery,” said Danielle.

Danielle's Research On Phantom Cell Got Her Recognition

After the discovery, she received the invitation to work with Professor Byrne to find more details about her findings. While working with the professor, she and other team members found 18 more phantom cell line names which could not be found in the repositories in which they were claimed by the hundreds of literary articles.

“That's a little bit like someone saying, I got these shoes from this particular shop and then you go to the shop, and they don't have them. They were never sold or even in stock," said Professor Byrne.

“At times we felt like we were going a bit crazy because these misspelt cell line identifiers can be quite hard to recognise so it was difficult work. But we were able to get through it by laughing quite a lot,” added Professor Byrne.

Standing May Not Reduce Cardiovascular Disease Risk: Study

A study by the University Of Sydney researchers found that standing more as compared to sitting in the long term will not improve cardiovascular health and will not reduce the related health risks including heart failure, stroke, and coronary heart disease. It could in fact increase the risk of circulatory issues such as deep vein thrombosis and varicose veins.

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