Following the publication of this article, we realized that the joint first author's name had been printed incorrectly in the journal: This was mispelled as "Lingqing Chen". The corrected name (Lingqiang Chen) is featured here. We regret any inconvenience this has caused, and thank the Editor for allowing us the opportunity to publish a Corrigendum. [the original article was published in the Molecular Medicine Reports 16: 3208‑3216, 2017; DOI: 10.3892/mmr.2017.7028].