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What does research data management mean in the daily practice of a researcher? In this series of interviews by RDM Support, researchers share their experiences on various aspects of research data management. In this interview postdoc Cathalijn Leenaars talks about how the R Cafe, organised by RDM Support, has helped her further in her research on the translation of animal studies.

How well can the results of animal studies be translated to humans? One researcher says that 20% of animal studies can be translated to humans. The other says 75%. All these researchers refer to different studies, from which these different percentages have indeed been shown. "Everyone says something that is true, but they all say different things," says Leenaars. “I wanted to do research on this. What percentages have actually been reported? I have done a on all types of research that look at the success rate and the translation rate from animals to humans. For this study I used R, a programming language developed for statistics and data analysis purposes. The monthly R Cafe organised by RDM Support has been of great help to me."

Getting more critical

Leenaars emphasizes the importance of this subject of research: “You very often see that drugs tested on animals, don't work on humans, while researchers are convinced that they have done meaningful research. For example, research into strokes: there are many substances that work well in animals, but have no added value in humans. That is why we need to do more research into this translation from animal to human, and we need to become more critical about which questions we can answer with laboratory animals and which questions we can't.”

We need to become more critical about which questions we can answer with laboratory animals and which questions we can't

The literature review includes 121 published papers, all of which describe a study of the translational results from animals to humans. "In these papers, the successful translation from animals to humans described ranges from 0% to 100%, a very broad range from which we can’t draw any conclusions. These big differences in translational success do not seem to be due to the type of animal used or the way in which calculations were made. Unfortunately, my research does not give a definite answer about the cause of this large spread in successful translation. That is why it is important that more research is done into how we can improve this translation".

R Café

"During my research in Nijmegen, I did a course on how to do meta-analyses in R. R is a pleasant programming language to work with, R software is open source and can be accessed anywhere. This makes it easy for me to apply the knowledge I gained here in my future career."

“Because of the help from the R Cafe I have a better result, and the process of achieving that result was much more pleasant”

"When I came to work at Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ��, I noticed that RDM Support organises a monthly R Cafe here, where R programmers meet to help each other. So I thought: oh, that's nice, because I actually want to learn more about R." Leenaars became a regular customer at the R Cafe. "The atmosphere is very friendly and open. Every time there is a short presentation, so you always learn something new. A lot of people who come here know a lot about R, so if you get stuck somewhere, you can quickly get help with that. Jonathan de Bruin, research engineer and host at the R Café, for example, showed me how I can import my data much more easily. For the systematic literature study, Barbara Vreede, Subject Librarian Science, helped me a lot with programming the graphs for the paper. These charts must be easy to read and as clear as possible. At a glance, people need to understand what is shown in the graph."

Many researchers are reinventing the wheel, and that's a waste of precious time

"Could I have done it without the R Cafe? Yes, I could have done it without it. But now I have a better result. And the process of achieving that result was much more pleasant. In addition, I have learned a lot of new things. I think a lot of researchers are reinventing the wheel. That's a waste of valuable time. The knowledge exchange between all R programmers is the added value of the R Cafe."

Cathalijn Leenaars

She spent her youth in Breda and then left for Leiden to study. Cathalijn Leenaars has a degree in Biology, Biomedical Sciences and also completed the first year of psychology. After that she worked as a researcher at the Radboud UMC and Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ��, among others, and now she works half of her time at the Hannover Medical School, and the other half at Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ��. “This shows that I am interested in a wide range of subjects and that is also how I came to the translational research. The multidisciplinary character appeals to me. Only 4 percent of PhD students find a permanent job in science, but I would love to be one of them.”

More information

Want to know more about the R Cafe? Please contact Jonathan de Bruin to register for the mailing list of the R Cafe. Are you interested in the other services that Research Data Management Support has to offer? Please contact Research Data Management Support.