Following the publication of this article, the authors regret that they did not make it clear which author was funded by the funding bodies. The information in the "Funding" part of the paper should therefore have been written as shown in follows (changes to the original text are highlighted in bold): "The present study was supported by the Young Scientists Fund of the National Natural Science, Foundation of China (to JL; grant no. 81502226) and the Guangdong Natural Science Foundation (to JL; grant no. 2014A030313038)." The authors apologize to the readership of the Journal for any inconvenience caused. [the original article was published in International Journal of Oncology 53: 855‑865, 2018; DOI: 10.3892/ijo.2018.4437].