Retraction:

Clifford C. Nwaeburu¹, Natalie Bauer¹, Zhefu Zhao¹, Alia Abukiwan¹, Jury Gladkich¹, Axel Benner², Ingrid Herr¹

¹Team Molecular OncoSurgery, Section Surgical Research, Department of General, Visceral and Transplantation Surgery, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany
²Department of Biostatistics, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany

Published: June 25, 2025

Copyright: © 2025 Nwaeburu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

This article has been retracted: Oncotarget has completed its investigation of this article, which determined that many instances of image overlap and duplication compromise the integrity of the presented data and findings. Wound healing assay Images from different treatment groups of different cell lines were the result of manipulations with a few initial images. Specifically, in Figure 3D, the 0-hour timepoint images one and two appear to be duplicates of images two and four, respectively. Furthermore, three images of AsPC-1 cells in Figure 3D at the 24-hour and 48-hour timepoints seem to be duplicates of three images of AsanPaCa cells found in Supplementary Figure 1E. Upon further review of Supplementary Figure 1E, we identified internal duplications at the 0-hour timepoint for both AsanPaCa cells (images 1 and 3 are duplicates of images 2 and 4) and PANC 1 cells (the top three images are duplicates). In addition, we have found duplications within the colony formation assay images presented in Figures 3 A-C. In Figure 3A, the last two images, representing different treatments, are duplicates. Moreover, the third image of Asan PaCa cells in Figure 3B appears to be a duplicate of the fourth image of PANC 1 cells in Figure 3C.
First author Clifford Nwaeburu provided corrected files for a new Figure S1 and Figure 3, but these did not resolve all the issues noted. Corresponding author Ingrid Herr contacted Onoctarget regarding the remaining image duplications and requested retraction of the article. Based on these circumstances, the Editorial decision was made to retract this paper. All authors except the first author, Clifford C. Nwaeburu, agreed with the decision.

Original article: Oncotarget. 2016; 7:58367-58380. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18632/oncotarget.11122.