Background: Lack of reproducibility in preclinical research is a problem posing ethical and economic challenges for biomedical science. Various institutional activities from society stakeholders of leading industry nations are currently underway to improve the situation. Such initiatives usually attempt to tackle high-level organisational issues and do not typically focus on improving experimental approaches per se. Addressing these is necessary in order to increase consistency and success rates of lab-to-lab repetitions.

Methods: In this project, we statistically evaluated repetitive data of a very basic and widely applied lab procedure, namely quantifying the number of viable cells. The purpose of this was to appreciate the impact of different parameters and instrumentations that may constitute sources of variance in this procedure.

Conclusion: By comparing the variations of data acquired under two different procedures, featuring improved stringency of protocol adherence, our project attempts to propose guidelines on how to reduce such variations. We believe our work can contribute to tackling the repeatability crisis in biomedical research.