This article is being retracted from Bioscience Reports at the request of the Editor-in-Chief and the Editorial Board following receipt of a notification from a reader, alerting the Editorial Board to concerns surrounding the appearance of Western blots and flow cytometry plots in this paper. The Western blots have concerning features including the shapes of the bands and minimal background detail, and the flow cytometry scatter plots share similarities with those found in other papers by different authors. Additionally, images in this paper seem to appear in papers by different authors, specifically:

  • Figure 2A 0 µg/mL panel which appears in Figure 6D by Chen et al, 2020 (DOI: 10.2147/CMAR.S243767) with rotation.

  • Figure 5A IGF-1 panel which appears as Figure 7A Kasumi-1 Inhibitor panel by Piao et al, 2020 (DOI: 10.3892/ijmm.2020.4671) with rotation.

The authors have been contacted with regards to the retraction and have not responded to the Journal's queries or the concerns raised. Given the extent of the issues raised, the Editorial Board stand by the decision to retract the article.

This is an open access article published by Portland Press Limited on behalf of the Biochemical Society and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY).