You are right that clinical trial studies would be much more time intensive and costly. The studies we will be replicating through the Reproducibility Initiative are more preclinical cancer studies, rather than later-stage clinical trials.
By clinical trials, a lot of the pharma companies have already done initial validation, so extra validation is redundant. We hope a reproducibility system to validate preclinical research can help patient groups, foundations, and industry better identify reproducible oncology targets, and hence the focus on preclinical studies (which in turn are less expensive).
Agreed - and this is a hugely important effort. This is more me musing about replication vs. reproducibility (on the computational/statistical end) vs. repeatability.
We felt the preclinical stage was more important to validate, as much of the research is based on academic studies with over 60% failure rate for replication (see http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a...)
By clinical trials, a lot of the pharma companies have already done initial validation, so extra validation is redundant. We hope a reproducibility system to validate preclinical research can help patient groups, foundations, and industry better identify reproducible oncology targets, and hence the focus on preclinical studies (which in turn are less expensive).