Lan Q, Tan X, He P, Li W, Tian S, Dong W. Onco Targets Ther. 2021;14:1429–1440.

We, the Editor and Publisher of the journal OncoTargets and Therapy have retracted the published article.

Following publication, concerns were raised regarding the use of non-verifiable cell lines described in the article. The concerns related specifically to the use of cell lines which were found to be either contaminated, wrongly identified, improperly indexed, unavailable through external cell line repositories, and/or lacking publications describing their establishment. Overall, these concerns raised doubts about the validity of the findings described in the article. The corresponding author did respond to our queries but was unable to provide satisfactory information relating to the use of these cell lines or provide satisfactory original data relating to the study. As verifying the validity of published work is core to the integrity of the scholarly record, the Publisher and Editor requested to retract the article and the corresponding author was notified of 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The retracted article will remain online to maintain the scholarly record, but it will be digitally watermarked on each page as “Retracted”.