Ye QD, Liao XL, Fu P, Dou JY, Chen K, Jiang H. Onco Targets Ther. 2016;9:6953–6963.

The Editor and Publisher of OncoTargets and Therapy wish to retract the published article. Concerns were raised regarding the alleged duplication of images in Figures 2 and 3, and the alleged duplication of western blot bands in Figure 5 with those from other articles. Specifically,

Figure 2Ba, HL60 cells, PCA (1 µM), appears to have been duplicated with the same image for Figure 3Ba, U937 cells, PCA (1 µM), and Figure 3Ba, U937 cells, PCA (2 µM), which has been flipped. The GAPDH western blot image in Figure 5E, appears to have been duplicated with the same GAPDH image used in Figure 8C from Yu et al, 2017 (https://doi.org/10.3892/ijmm.2017.3098); Figure 2A from Zou et al, 2017 (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-00686-8); Figure 6B from Guo et al, 2017 (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-01832-y); Figure 3a from Jiang et al, 2017 (https://doi.org/10.1038/emm.2017.41) and Figure 2B from Miao et al, 2016 (https://doi.org/10.3727/096504016X14685034103671).

The authors did not respond to our queries and as we cannot verify the validity of the published work, we are therefore retracting the article and have notified the authors of this.

We have been informed in our decision-making by our policy on publishing ethics and integrity and the COPE guidelines on retractions.

The retracted article will remain online to maintain the scholarly record, but it will be digitally watermarked on each page as “Retracted”.