Withdrawal notice for: “Circulating RNA differences between patients with stable and progressive lung function in IPF.” Britt Clynick, Helen E. Jo, Tamera J. Corte, Ian N. Glaspole, Christopher Grainge, Peter M.A. Hopkins, Paul N. Reynolds, Sally Chapman, E. Haydn Walters, Christopher Zappala, Gregory J. Keir, Wendy A. Cooper, Annabelle M. Mahar, Samantha Ellis, Nicole Goh, Svetlana Baltic, Marissa Ryan, Dino Tan and Yuben Moodley. Eur Respir J 2019; in press.

doi:10.1183/13993003.02115-2018

This article has been withdrawn from publication at the request of the authors.

This research letter was originally accepted for publication in the European Respiratory Journal on 14 April 2019, and subsequently published online in “early view” format on 13 June 2019. Shortly after the early view publication, the authors contacted the editors to inform them that they had identified an error in group allocation which then inevitably affected their between-group statistical calculations. This had a potential impact on the results reported in their manuscript. At that point, the extent of the error and the nature of the potential impact on the published paper was not known. As a result, a publisher's note to that effect was added to the title page of the published work on 8 July 2019.

This unfortunate circumstance was due to a mistake made by the statistics team working with the authors in the allocation of individual idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) patients into the two (progressor and stable) IPF groups for between-group analysis. In effect, this simple error led to a misallocation for approximately 50% of all the study participants.

After a full and correct re-assignment of subjects to their correct clinical groups, a re-analysis of the underlying data and the undertaking of some further experimental work, the authors informed the editors that the specific findings of their published manuscript were no longer supported. Although the new findings were, in principle, similar, the circulating RNA differences stated as significant in the original research letter were not found to be significant anymore; however, the re-analysis indicated significance for other circulating RNA transcripts, specifically reporting the significantly higher expression of TAF2 in progressive versus stable IPF, with potentially relevant transcripts found to be differentially expressed in IPF patients versus healthy controls. Due to the nature and extent of the difference between the findings of the original work and the later results, the authors requested, with agreement from the editors, that the original research letter be withdrawn from publication; the editors also agreed that the authors were welcome to submit their revised findings as a de novo submission to the journal, where it will be peer reviewed in due course.

As these issues were detected and brought to the editors’ attention before the final version of record for the article was published, this notice of withdrawal replaces the early view version of the published article, which has now been removed. The editors thank the authors for their cooperation in the matter and for informing them of this issue without hesitation.