[my tweets from a seminar I went to today, presented in reverse chronological order]
1:36pm
The middle-author problem: if you get little credit for your role in a study, where’s the incentive to check & vouch for the whole project?
12:58pm
Larry Kessler: As part of their training, grad students can re-run publicly available code and see whether they get the same results.
12:57pm
One Duke prof falsified a line of his CV, saying he got a Rhodes Scholarship … to Australia. Not really Rhodes Scholar material.
12:53pm
Kessler: Also, letters of concern to journals should not just be forwarded back to the authors of the article under suspicion.
12:52pm
Witten: How can 2 reviewers fairly evaluate a multidisciplinary 30-person paper? No way to do that, plus it isn’t their job.
12:51pm
Question from audience: role of journal editors and peer review in Duke case?
12:50pm
Kessler: Duke scientists wanted fame, promotions, grants … but weren’t aiming for royalties on diagnostic test. Wasn’t about $$ per se.
12:48pm
@smfullerton asks about conflict of interest, the elephant in the room. Duke scientists had vested interests in clinical trials?
12:46pm
Funders support discovery of exciting new approaches but are reluctant to support validation, so validation naturally gets neglected.
12:44pm
FDA needs to develop a guide on how to bring an omics test to the clinic. It’s been “putzing around” for a decade, Kessler says.
12:43pm
Institutions don’t always support multi-discipline work to ensure proper credit and accountability. What about middle authors?
12:38pm
There is a “bright line” between test discovery/validation on one side and evaluation for clinical utility/use on the other.
12:37pm
Kessler says we think we know how to do discovery and test validation, but lots of mistakes get made. Don’t validate on already-used data!
12:33pm
IOM report explains how to “correctly” translate omics diagnostics from bench to beside, and lists responsibilities of various parties.
12:31pm
Institute of Medicine report was released in March. Larry Kessler (who served on the IoM committee with Witten) will tell us about it now.
12:30pm
Aftermath of Duke debacle: dozens of papers retracted, careers of 162 coauthors jeopardized; public faith undermined.
12:28pm
The Duke problem was not just an academic one. The Duke papers, with their mistakes, were being used to guide clinical trials!
12:25pm
Keith Baggerly & Kevin Coombes of MD Anderson reported mistakes in publicly available Duke data (Annals of Applied Statistics 2009).
12:22pm
Concerns about Duke work were initially brushed off as “squabbles among statisticians.”
12:20pm
2006: Duke people started publishing high-profile papers on using omics to predict cancer outcomes. Others had trouble replicating results.
12:18pm
Challenges of omics data: (6) multidisciplinary analyses require cooperation and trust.
12:17pm
Challenges of omics data: (5) it’s hard to apply intuition to models with thousands of genes. Hard to tell what the data *should* look like.
12:16pm
Challenges of omics data: (4) expense of experiments and limited samples mean that results aren’t always validated.
12:14pm
Challenges of omics data: (3) complicated experiments and analysis increase the likelihood of errors.
12:14pm
Challenges of omics data: (2) Batch effects may cause results in one lab not to generalize to other labs.
12:13pm
Challenges of omics data: (1) many variables (e.g., genes) vs. number of observations (e.g., patients) leads to high risk of overfitting.
12:10pm
Recent @nytimes series “Genetic Gamble” highlights promise and difficulty of using genomics to guide cancer treatment.
12:08pm
Daniela Witten’s definition of omics: characterization of global sets of biological molecules (DNA, RNA, protein, metabolites, etc.).
12:04pm
Today’s topic: recommendations of Institute of Medicine panel on responsible use of omics data in clinical research.
12:03pm
Website for UW Biomedical Research Integrity program: http://depts.washington.edu/uwbri/
12:00pm
BRI seminar will feature Larry Kessler and Daniela Witten, with moderation by @smfullerton.
11:58am
Now attending the UW Biomedical Research Integrity seminar “Responsible Research in the Era of Omics: Past, Present, & Future.”
