Bad Statistics, and Bad Training, Are Sabotaging Drug Discovery
Summary
A recent paper by statistician Valen Johnson of Texas A&M University in College Station suggested that one out of every four published scientific studies draw false conclusions because they employ weak statistical standards.The idea that many researchers simply aren’t running and analyzing their experiments properly appeared in yet another article focused on trying to understand why mouse models often don’t wind up being useful predictors of drug responses in human diseases.And for all of the articles that we’ve read over the past few years pleading for new programs to get students amped up and interested in STEM careers, maybe a bigger problem is the insufficient training of a significant percentage of current scientists.Given that the federal government is funding a large percentage of research studies via the NIH, they should consider assembling an extramural statistical group to help grantees with both the design of their experiments and the analysis of their data.This is especially true given the enormous increase in future industry revenues predicted by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics assuming the successful adoption of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare).
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