Registered report: androgen receptor splice variants determine taxane sensitivity in prostate cancer.

The Prostate Cancer Foundation-Movember Foundation Reproducibility Initiative seeks to address growing concerns about reproducibility in scientific research by conducting replications of recent papers in the field of prostate cancer. This Registered Report describes the proposed replication plan of key experiments from "Androgen Receptor Splice Variants Determine Taxane Sensitivity in Prostate Cancer" by Thadani-Mulero and colleagues (2014) published in Cancer Research in 2014. The experiment that will be replicated is reported in Fig. 6A. Thadani-Mulero and colleagues generated xenografts from two prostate cancer cell lines; LuCaP 86.2, which expresses predominantly the ARv567 splice variant of the androgen receptor (AR), and LuCaP 23.1, which expresses the full length AR as well as the ARv7 variant. Treatment of the tumors with the taxane docetaxel showed that the drug inhibited tumor growth of the LuCaP 86.2 cells but not of the LuCaP 23.1 cells, indicating that expression of splice variants of the AR can affect sensitivity to docetaxel. The Prostate Cancer Foundation-Movember Foundation Reproducibility Initiative is a collaboration between the Prostate Cancer Foundation, the Movember Foundation and Science Exchange, and the results of the replications will be published by PeerJ.