Towards replicability and sustainability in cancer research

High-quality cancer research is crucial to both save lives and improve quality of life. Spurious findings, however, impedes these laudable goals by misleading research efforts and creating research waste that is inherently difficult to counteract. Irreproducible research is intrinsically wasteful, and unsustainable over the long term. In this perspective piece, we elucidate the extent of the current replication crisis and the underlying causes, identifying practices that lend themselves to unsustainable spurious findings, and the factors that underpin these practices. Finally we outline some remedies to the problem of irreproducible research, and how we might move towards more sustainable and trustworthy research in biomedical science.