RETRACTION: Bivalent Gadolinium Ions Forming Injectable Hydrogels for Simultaneous In Situ Vaccination Therapy and Imaging of Soft Tissue Sarcoma.

Abstract

C. Wang, Y. Jing, W. Yu, J. Gu, Z. Wei, A. Chen, Y.-T. Yen, X. He, L. Cen, A. Chen, X. Song, Y. Wu, L. Yu, G. Tao, B. Liu, S. Wang, B. Xue, and R. Li, "Bivalent Gadolinium Ions Forming Injectable Hydrogels for Simultaneous In Situ Vaccination Therapy and Imaging of Soft Tissue Sarcoma," Advanced Healthcare Materials 12, no. 26 (2023): 2300877, https://doi.org/10.1002/adhm.202300877. The above article, published online on 11 August 2023 in Wiley Online Library (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/), has been retracted by agreement between the authors; the journal Editor-in-Chief, Uta Goebel; and Wiley-VCH GmbH. A third party alerted the editor to concerns about an error in terminology: Divalent/bivalent Gadolinium²⁺ is referenced throughout the text, but the dominant and correct form is trivalent (Gadolinium³⁺). The authors acknowledge this error, noting that the stable oxidation state of gadolinium under physiological conditions is indeed ⁺³, not ⁺². They confirm that this was an error in chemical terminology, not in the materials or experimental design, as the commercially available Gd(III)-gadodiamide was used. Additionally, the authors identified an error in the hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining results of Figure 9, in which a subpanel was mistakenly replaced with a duplicate image from an alternate set of H&E staining images that the authors had prepared with different scale bars for visual optimization. The authors note that this error occurred during file reorganization and was unintentional. Because of these errors that impact the study's premise and results, the article must be retracted. A revised version of this article is available here: [https://doi.org/10.1002/adhm.71182].