{"entity":{"id":"idea-bio1-model-authentication-mandate","kind":"idea","name":"Prove the cell line is what you say it is, or the paper does not run","aka":[],"tldr":"A troubling share of published cancer experiments use cell lines that are contaminated or mislabelled. Requiring a simple identity check before publication would stop this.","summary":"Short tandem repeat profiling costs little and detects misidentification and cross-contamination, yet compliance is patchy. Mandatory deposition of STR profiles (and, for patient-derived models, low-pass sequencing confirming donor identity and drift) at submission, checked automatically against the register of misidentified lines, would remove a known and fully solvable source of irreproducibility. Some journals already require it; enforcement is inconsistent.","asOf":"2026-09-08","links":[{"label":"ICLAC register of misidentified cell lines","url":"https://iclac.org/databases/cross-contaminations/"}],"tags":[],"related":[],"cancers":[],"sections":[],"technologies":[],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":[],"pathways":[],"terms":[],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":["b-preclinical-models","b-reproducibility"],"keyPapers":[],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"notes":[],"hypothesis":"Mandatory automated authentication checking at submission reduces the proportion of published oncology papers using misidentified lines to under 1 percent within three years.","rationale":"Cell-line misidentification is one of the few reproducibility problems with a cheap, definitive test and an existing reference database; the failure is purely one of enforcement.","test":"Two major journals implement automated checking for one year; measure rejection or correction rate and compare with matched journals that do not.","maturity":"preclinical-evidence","actor":"policy","cost":"small","horizonYears":2},"route":"/ideas/idea-bio1-model-authentication-mandate/","neighbours":{"bottleneck":[{"id":"b-preclinical-models","kind":"bottleneck","name":"Lab models that fail to predict what happens in patients","route":"/bottlenecks/b-preclinical-models/"},{"id":"b-reproducibility","kind":"bottleneck","name":"Preclinical results do not reproduce","route":"/bottlenecks/b-reproducibility/"}]}}