Sun Y, Jiang M, Ji Y, Sun Y, Liu Y, Shen W. Drug Des Devel Ther. 2019;13:2911–2922.
At the author’s request, we the Editors and Publisher of Drug Design, Development and Therapy have retracted the following article.
Since publication, concerns have been raised about the integrity of the data in the article and the timing of the ethics approval described in the reported study. When approached for an explanation, the authors were cooperative and explained that unfortunately, they did not obtain the appropriate ethics approval from the ethics committee prior to commencing the preliminary trial associated with the clinical trial. In addition, the authors report that they no longer have access to the written informed consent documents signed by the participants prior to commencement of the clinical trial. The authors recognized the error in not obtaining ethics approval for the preliminary trial or retaining important participant documentation relating to the clinical trial and thus requested to retract the article. The editor agreed with the decision and the authors wish to apologize for this error.
We have been informed in our decision-making by our editorial policies and COPE guidelines.
The retracted article will remain online to maintain the scholarly record, but it will be digitally watermarked on each page as ‘Retracted’.