Wu J, Li W, Ning J, Yu W, Rao T, Cheng F. Onco Targets Ther. 2019;12:495–508.

At the authors request, the Editor and Publisher of the journal OncoTargets and Therapy have retracted the published article.

Following publication of the article, the authors raised concerns about the duplication of images from Figure 6 with those from unrelated articles. Specifically,

Images for Figure 6F, shRNA scramble, PCNA and UCA1 shRNA, Ki67, have been duplicated with images for Figure 4E, MCCK1+TMZ, Caspase-3 and Figure 5E, IM+Tan, Ki67, from Liu T, Li A, Xu Y, Xin Y. MCCK1 enhances the anticancer effect of temozolomide in attenuating the invasion, migration and epithelial-mesenchymal transition of glioblastoma cells in vitro and in vivo. Cancer Med. 2019;8:751–760. https://doi.org/10.1002/cam4.1951 and Teng Z, Xu S, Lei Q. Tanshinone IIA enhances the inhibitory effect of imatinib on proliferation and motility of acute leukemia cell line TIB‑152 in vivo and in vitro by inhibiting the PI3K/AKT/mTOR signaling pathway [Retracted]. Oncology Reports. 2020;43:503-515. https://doi.org/10.3892/or.2019.7453, respectively.

The corresponding author was cooperative and responded to our queries but was unable to provide a satisfactory explanation for how the images came to be duplicated or provide satisfactory original data for the study. As verifying the validity of published work is core to the integrity of the scholarly record, the authors requested to retract the article and the Publisher and Editor agreed with this decision.

We have been informed in our decision-making by our editorial policies and COPE guidelines.

The retracted article will remain online to maintain the scholarly record, but it will be digitally watermarked on each page as “Retracted”.