ABSTRACT
Researchers are discovering targets more quickly, and the increasing understanding of pathway biology has necessitated multidisciplinary approaches to omics. Although government agencies can adopt specific community standards as government regulations, thereby making them mandatory, adherence to standards is most frequently voluntary. Materials standards are also used in some research communities, particularly in areas like vaccine and gene therapy development and microbiology. A substantially improved preclinical reproducibility rate would both de-risk preclinical investments and result in an increased hit rate, thereby increasing the productivity of research and improving the speed and efficiency of the therapeutic drug development processes. Standards can benefit life science research quality and reproducibility by decreasing unrecognized variance between laboratories, and can serve as an effective tool for disseminating and encouraging consensus-based research practices. Standards can serve to establish systems that promote and ensure consistent quality and the reproducibility of research results.
