Huang X, Chen Z, Shi W, et al. Drug Des Devel Ther.2019;13:2009–2019.
The Editor and Publisher of Drug Design, Development and Therapy are retracting the published article. An investigation raised concerns regarding the duplication of western blot bands in Figure 5B, where the images for Figure 5B IP: IgG; IB: Foxo3a and IP: IgG; IB: TCF4 are duplicated.
The authors cooperated with the investigation and provided data associated with the reported study. However, despite the authors’ assistance, a satisfactory explanation for how the images came to be duplicated could not be provided, and the validity of the published work could not be verified. The decision was made to retract the article and the authors were notified of this.
We have been informed in our decision-making by our policy on publishing ethics and integrity and the COPE guidelines on retractions.
The retracted article will remain online to maintain the scholarly record, but it will be digitally watermarked on each page as “Retracted”.