Registered report: Senescence surveillance of pre-malignant hepatocytes limits liver cancer development

Abstract

The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology seeks to address growing concerns about reproducibility in scientific research by conducting replications of 50 papers in the field of cancer biology published between 2010 and 2012. This Registered report describes the proposed replication plan of key experiments from ‘Senescence surveillance of pre-malignant hepatocytes limits liver cancer development’ by Kang et al. (2011), published in Nature in 2011. The experiments that will be replicated are those reported in Figures 3B, 3C, 3E, and 4A. In these experiments, Kang et al. (2011) demonstrate the phenomenon of oncogene-induced cellular senescence and immune-mediated clearance of senescent cells after intrahepatic injection of NRAS (Figures 2I, 3B, 3C, and 3E). Additionally, Kang et al. (2011) show the specific necessity of CD4+ T cells for immunoclearance of senescent cells (Figure 4A). The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology is a collaboration between the Center for Open Science and Science Exchange, and the results of the replications will be published by eLife.

Keywords

• Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology
• methodology
• immune-mediated clearance
• CD4+ T-cell
• oncogene-induced senescence