Scientific research does not always go as it was conceived or hoped for. Sometimes, your hypothesis doesn’t work out, mistakes may be made. Experiments can yield negative or unusable results, which then end up in the trash can. Postdoctoral researcher Florencia Abinzano and her team, however, insisted on publishing the negative results of an animal study from her PhD research so that others could learn from them. This brought her a nomination for the Trial and Error award.
It may seem like a dubious honor to be in the running for a Trial and Error award, but Abinzano is proud of it. She was nominated for part of her doctoral research at Utrecht University. Since 2022, she has worked as a senior cartilage repair researcher at the TU/e Department of Biomedical Engineering in the Orthopaedic Biomechanics group.
Florencia Abinzano completed her doctorate in March 2024, richer by two children, a coronavirus pandemic, and a job at TU/e. In the closing words of her dissertation, she thanks the eight ponies that sacrificed their lives for cartilage repair research.
Negative results
Abinzano outlines the situation. "I was working on a sub-study on a huge project. I focused on cartilage repair; others were working on a bone implant. Everything seemed fine, but it’s sometimes not enough to work with these different, limited models that are unable to truly recreate the complex situation inside the knee. Sadly, we learned this the hard way. That’s why now we’re working to develop more realistic models using bioreactors.""We spent six months doing in vivo research. There was so much work from so many people, and being left empty-handed was hugely disappointing. Due to the problems with the bone component, we couldn’t come to any conclusions about the cartilage repair. We had an incredible amount of data and eight dead ponies. We were scared that the data would end up in some drawer just because the results were negative."
Abinzano doesn’t want her experience to have been for nothing. "I learned valuable lessons about how we could have done things differently. I wanted others to be able to learn from my mistakes."
Journal of Trial and Error
Abinzano and other members of her Utrecht-based research team decided to write an "That was a longer process than I had hoped, but now all that research wasn’t in vain. Other researchers can read the paper, learn from what went wrong in our project and do things better."Close the gap
The open-access journal Trial and Error is an initiative of Utrecht University that ’aims to close the gap between what is researched and what is published,’ as they state on their website. "It’s a small journal, but the people who make it take open science extremely seriously," Abinzano says.
They publish not only failed experiments but also rejected research proposals. And articles reflecting on meta-science: scientific studies of science and its challenges.
To further their commitment to open science, they publish and release all’articles for free thanks to financial support from the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities at Utrecht University.
The Journal of Trial and Error is a fantastic platform to publish negative results; I’m glad we found it.
Postdoctoral researcher Florencia Abinzano
Interest from the scientific community
Abinzano also wrote an abstract of her publication for several international conferences, expecting it to become a poster that was hung in a corner somewhere. "However, they asked us to prepare oral presentations that attracted a big response, with well-attended sessions on how important it is to talk about negative results and not shelve them. We need to learn from them so that others don’t make the same mistakes by sharing and talking about them. Other researchers wanted to know how I had managed to publish about this and why we don’t do that more."Award
The Trial and Error award presented in March was established by the editors of the journal of the same name. To create awareness around failure in science and praise it. Abinzano didn’t win, but still got a lot of satisfaction and lessons from it.Publish all’your results, including those that don’t seem to matter. Then others won’t have to research this again.
Postdoctoral researcher Florencia Abinzano
The cartilage conundrum
Cartilage tissue, found at the ends of long bones, forms a thin cushion between moving joints. This allows bones to slide over each other easily and painlessly. Make no mistake about cartilage, warns Abinzano about her favorite research topic."Cartilage seems relatively simple because it has no nerves or blood vessels. In the early days of tissue engineering, people thought they would quickly find a solution to tissue engineer cartilage. But 20 years later, we still haven’t developed durable cartilage repair."
Knee joint
Abinzano focuses on cartilage repair, specifically in the knee joint. When cartilage in the knee becomes damaged, it causes patients a great deal of pain and discomfort, and if left untreated, it can lead to early osteoarthritis.In the Netherlands, one and a half million people suffer from osteoarthritis due to wear and tear of the cartilage. "Cartilage cannot repair itself, but with outside help, it may succeed," says the researcher of Argentine origin.
Deceptively simple
"But cartilage is deceptively simple because its mechanical properties come from a complex microscopic organization and have been shown to be difficult to reproduce in the lab or patients. The cartilage we can now fabricate in the lab is not durable. When implanted, the material breaks down too quickly, and it’s never as good as the body’s cartilage in your knee."Here at TU/e, Abinzano uses an advanced cartilage model to test possible treatments for cartilage repair using a bioreactor that can imitate the forces in the knee joint. Only after these are thoroughly validated in the lab will animal tests follow.
"I learned that you shouldn’t test too quickly in vivo (laboratory animals, ed.). We now receive leftover knee material from the Máxima Medical Center from patients who have received prosthetic knees. We test our theory on those first in the laboratory, helping to reduce and maybe even replace animal testing."
Hopeful knee patients
Ever since her master’s degree, Abinzano has been focusing on growing cartilage. "My ultimate goal is to create a biological implant to replace damaged cartilage. One that can accompany the patient during their entire life. That’s what many knee patients are hopefully waiting for."She is realistic enough to realize that finding the holy grail will take some time. "Should I not succeed, I hope that the students we train here will succeed in the future. I’m putting my efforts into that because, with this, we could ultimately help many people."
From our strategy: on open science
As a social organization, TU/e focuses on generating and disseminating knowledge. Research paid for from public funds must be freely accessible worldwide. This applies to scientific publications and other forms of scientific output. By sharing our research results and methods with anyone who wants to read them - open science - we share our knowledge with society, industry, and scientific colleagues.We seek greater collaboration and transparency in all phases of research so that others can learn from it. And we can work together to find solutions to future challenges.
