Retraction:

Jian-Jie Zhao¹, Shuai Hao¹, Ling-Li Wang¹, Chun-Yan Hu¹, Shu Zhang¹, Ling-Ji Guo¹, Gang Zhang¹, Bo Gao¹, Yan Jiang¹, Wu-Guo Tian¹, Dong-Lin Luo¹

¹ Department of Breast, Thyroid, and Vascular Surgery, Research Institute of Surgery, Daping Hospital, Third Military Medical University, Chongqing, 400042, P. R. China

Published: December 31, 2025

Copyright: © 2025 Zhao 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This article has been retracted: Oncotarget has concluded its investigation of this paper. Multiple instances of internal and external duplications and overlaps of Transwell assy images were discovered. These include:

Internal Duplications:
Figure 5, TPC-1, panel A is a duplicate of SW579 panels A and B, and correspondingly SW579 panels A and B are duplicates too.
Figure 5, TPC-1, panel E overlaps with SW579 panel D.
Figure 6, TPC-1 panel A overlaps with panel B.

External Duplications:
Figures 5 and 6 contain panels that overlap with earlier published figures 7 and 12 in already retracted article [1] and Figure 8D in article [2]. Concurrently published papers [3] and [4] also shred images from Figures 5 and 6. And multiple panels from Figures 5 and 6 were found in later published unrelated articles [5–8].

The authors and their institution have been contacted, but neither has responded. Therefore, the Editorial decision has been made to retract the paper.

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Original article: Oncotarget. 2016; 7:57903–57918. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18632/oncotarget.11087.