Dozens of cancer studies may be thrown into doubt by the discovery that researchers inadvertently used the wrong type of cancer cells.
The "cell lines", according to the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, were supplied as samples of oesophageal cancer.
However, tests show they contained other types of tumour, including lung and bowel.
The Dutch researchers say this could put major trials of drugs in doubt.
Many experimental studies on cancer use laboratory-grown "cell-lines", meaning that dozens of studies may rely on cells originally taken from a single patient.
New drugs can be tested on these cells to see if they have an effect before they are tested on real patients.
The problem of "false" - or contaminated - cell lines, is not a new one, and there have been calls for scientists to take more care verifying they have the right sort of cells before continuing with their experiments.
If not, they run the risk that their findings, positive or negative, may be misleading.
The latest example of the problem involved samples widely supplied as oesophageal adenocarcinoma cells, a particular type of cancer affecting the gullet which carries food from the mouth to the stomach.
In fact, they came from tumours of the lung, bowel and stomach, said researchers from the University Medical Centre in Rotterdam.
They wrote: "Experimental results based on these contaminated cell lines have led to ongoing clinical trials recruiting patients, to more than 100 scientific publications, and to at least three cancer research grants and 11 US patents - which emphasises the importance of our findings."
Widespread use of these cell lines could threaten the development of new treatments, they said.
In particular, use of the drug sorafenib for some oesophageal cancer patients should be reconsidered, since the wrong cell line was used to assess its potential.
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