Retraction Note to: International Journal of Clinical Oncology (2020) 25:1145–1154 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10147-020-01653-6

The Editor-in-Chief has retracted this article upon request of the corresponding author. Following publication, the authors were unable to replicate the presented results due to the use of the contaminated SMMC7721 cell line in the original experiments. In addition, data duplication has been identified in Figs. 3A, 3C and 5E, raising further concerns regarding the integrity of the data. The authors provided new data to address these issues, but the Editor deemed their response to the concerns insufficient.


All authors agree to this retraction.