Retraction:

Jin-Long Hu¹, Xin-Long Hu², Ai-Ye Guo³, Chao-Jie Wang¹, Yi-Yang Wen¹, ShunDong Cang¹

¹ Department of Oncology, Henan Provincial People’s Hospital, Zhengzhou 450000, P. R. China
² Department of Medical Imaging Technology, Henan University of Chinese Medicine, Zhengzhou 450000, P. R. China
³ Laboratory of Clinical Research, Henan Provincial People’s Hospital, Zhengzhou 450000, P. R. China

Published: December 31, 2025

Copyright: © 2025 Hu 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This article has been retracted: Oncotarget has completed its investigation of the article, which uncovered multiple instances of image duplication and overlap. Specifically, Figure 2B contains western blot bands also found in Figure 9A of [1], Figure 5A of [2], and Figure 7C of [3]. The b-actin blots in Figures 5B and 6A appeared as different blots in papers [4, 5], respectively. Multiple internal and external duplications of plate images from the colony formation assay were found in Figures 3D, 6D and 8D. The Figure 8D images were also found in Figure 2C of [6], in Figure 4B of [7], in Figure 5C of [8], and in Figure 7C of [9]. In addition, overlaps were found in the MDC staining fluorescent images across Figures 3E and 6E, and 6E and 8E. The authors have failed to respond to repeated requests for documentation to address these concerns. In light of these facts, the Editorial decision has been made to retract this paper.

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Original article: Oncotarget. 2017; 8:49380–49394. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18632/oncotarget.17673.