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Open Access

Retraction

Retraction: Comparison of Steroid-Free Immunosuppression and Standard Immunosuppression for Liver Transplant Patients with Hepatocellular Carcinoma

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Concerns have been raised that the transplants performed in the local context at the time of procedures reported in this article [1] may have involved organs/tissues procured from prisoners [2].

Details as to the donor sources and methods of obtaining informed consent from donors were not reported in [1], and the authors did not reply to journal queries seeking to clarify these issues and the cause(s) of donor death. International ethics standards call for transparency in organ donor and transplantation programs and clear informed consent procedures including considerations to ensure that donors are not subject to coercion.

In addition, the authors did not provide documentation when requested by the journal to confirm that the study had institutional ethics approval, and they did not respond to inquiries about the availability of underlying data supporting this study.

Owing to the lack of documentation to demonstrate this study had prospective ethical approval, insufficient reporting, unresolved concerns around the source of transplanted organs and whether they included organs from prisoners, and in compliance with international ethical standards for organ/tissue donation and transplantation, the PLOS ONE Editors retract this article.

The authors did not respond to the retraction notification.

References

  1. 1. Xing T, Huang L, Yu Z, Zhong L, Wang S, Peng Z (2013) Comparison of Steroid-Free Immunosuppression and Standard Immunosuppression for Liver Transplant Patients with Hepatocellular Carcinoma. PLoS ONE 8(8): e71251. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0071251 pmid:23940730
  2. 2. Rogers W, Robertson MP, Ballantyne A, Blakely B, Catsanos R, Clay-Williams R, et al. Compliance with ethical standards in the reporting of donor sources and ethics review in peer-reviewed publications involving organ transplantation in China: a scoping review. BMJ Open 2019;9(2): e024473. pmid:30723071

Citation: The PLOS ONE Editors (2019) Retraction: Comparison of Steroid-Free Immunosuppression and Standard Immunosuppression for Liver Transplant Patients with Hepatocellular Carcinoma. PLoS ONE 14(9): e0222257. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0222257

Published: September 4, 2019

Copyright: © 2019 The PLOS ONE Editors. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.