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IT MAY NOT BE SEXY, BUT QUALITY ASSURANCE IS BECOMING A CRUCIAL PART OF LAB LIFE.
Rebecca Davies remembers a time when quality assurance terrified her. In 2007, Rshe had been asked to lead accreditation efforts at the University of Minnesota's Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory in Saint Paul. The lab needed to ensure that the tens of thousands of tests it conducts to monitor disease in pets, poultry, livestock and wildlife were watertight. "It was a huge task. I felt sick to my stomach," recalls Davies, an endocrinologist at the university's College of Veterinary Medicine.
She nevertheless accepted the challenge, and soon found herself hooked on finding - and fixing - problems in the research process. She and her team tracked recurring tissue-contamination issues to how containers were being filled and stored; they traced an assay's erratic performance to whether technicians let an enzyme warm to room temperature; and they established systems to eliminate spotty data collection, malfunctioning equipment and neglected controls. Her efforts were crucial to keeping the diagnostic lab in business, but they also forced her to realize how much researchers' work could improve. "That is the beauty of quality assurance," Davies says. "That is what we were missing out on as scientists."
Davies wanted to spread the word. In 2009, she got permission and financial support to launch an internal consulting group for the college, to help labs with the dry but essential work of quality assurance (QA). The group, called Quality Central, now supports more than half a dozen research labs - helping them to design systems to ensure that their equipment, materials and data are up to scratch, and helping them to improve.
She is also part of a small but growing group of professionals around the world who hope to transform basic biomedical research. Many were hired by their universities to help labs to meet certain regulatory standards, but these QA consultants have a broader vision. They are not pushing for universal adoption of formal regulatory certifications. Instead, they advocate 'voluntary QA'. With the right strategies, they argue, scientists can strengthen their research and improve reproducibility.
When Davies first started proselytizing to her fellow faculty members, the responses were not encouraging. "None of them found the idea compelling at...