This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (https://www.elsevier.com/about/our-business/policies/article-withdrawal). This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief. Colony plates from Fig. 1D appear similar to colony plates from Fig. 1(d) (after vertical flipping) of the article published by Luping Wang, Junyu Wang, Hong Zhao, Guoping Jiang, Xiaojie Feng, Wenxia Sui and Hongling Liu in Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology 392 (2019) 551–563 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00210-018-01607-w, Fig. 2D of the article published by the corresponding author Hui Gao et al. in the American Journal of Cancer Research 6 (2016) 2755–2771 http://www.ajcr.us/files/ajcr0039673.pdf and Fig. 3B of the article published by Tingting Wang, Yuhua Jiang, Lei Chu, Tianhui Wu and Jie You in the American Journal of Cancer Research 7 (2017) 999–1015 http://www.ajcr.us/files/ajcr0048620.pdf. Panels from Fig. 5D appear similar to panels from Fig. 4B of the article published by Luping Wang, Lu Yun, Xiaojun Wang, Liying Sha, Luning Wang, Yingying Sui and Hui Zhang in Life Sciences 218 (2019) 16–24 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lfs.2018.12.023. Panels from Fig. 6F appear similar to panels from Fig. 6F of the article published by Luping Wang, Lu Yun, Xiaojun Wang, Liying Sha, Luning Wang, Yingying Sui and Hui Zhang in Life Sciences 218 (2019) 16–24 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lfs.2018.12.023, Fig. 7H of the article published by Ying Niu, Jinping Zhang, Yalin Tong, Jiansheng Li and Bingrong Liu in Life Sciences 237 (2019) 116893 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lfs.2019.116893 and Fig. 7F of the article published by Dong Li, Xiaoyan Li, Genqu Li, Yan Meng, Yanghong Jin, Shuang Shang and Yanjie Li in Life Sciences 216 (2019) 259–270 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lfs.2018.11.032. One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original. As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process. © 2020 Elsevier Inc.