Eight years ago, a team of researchers launched a project to carefully repeat early but influential lab experiments in cancer research.

They recreated 50 experiments, the type of preliminary research with mice and test tubes that sets the stage for new cancer drugs.

But for cancer patients, it can raise false hopes to read headlines of a mouse study that seems to promise a cure "just around the corner," Prasad said.

By the time cancer drugs reach the market, they’ve been tested rigorously in large numbers of people to make sure they are safe and they work.

For the project, the researchers tried to repeat experiments from cancer biology papers published from 2010 to 2012 in major journals such as Cell, Science and Nature.

A third was a mouse study of a potential prostate cancer drug.

A co-author of the prostate cancer study said the research done at Sanford Burnham Prebys research institute has held up to other scrutiny.

Study co-author Brian Nosek of the Center for Open Science said it can be wasteful to plow ahead without first doing the work to repeat findings.

The researchers tried to minimize differences in how the cancer experiments were conducted.

A decade ago, he and other in-house scientists at Amgen reported even lower rates of confirmation when they tried to repeat published cancer experiments

Cancer research is difficult, Begley said, and "it is very easy for researchers to be attracted to results that look exciting and provocative, results that appear to further support their favorite idea as to how cancer should work, but that are just wrong."