Cell Authentication Survey Shows Little Progress in a Decade

In a recent survey coducted by the GBSI (446 respondents), more than half do not perform any type of authentication on their cells lines. Twenty four percent see no need to authenticate. There are 9,000 projects with and expenditure of $3.7 billion dollars that use cell lines. With a conservative estimate of a 20% incidence in contamination/mis-labeling/wrong species in current cell culture stocks, the math says that almost $700 million of that expenditure may be at risk due to unrelaiable results.