Document is current

Article History

Received: 26 October 2017

Accepted: 19 April 2018

First Online: 27 April 2018

Ethics approval and consent to participate

: This study was carried out according to the recommendations of the ethics committee of the Medical Faculty of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany. The current study has been performed in a retrospective manner in a cohort of patients diagnosed and treated according to national guidelines. In addition, the data sets as well as the specimens were irreversibly anonymized prior to inclusion in the study. Hence, under the circumstances aforementioned, neither a written consent nor a project specific approval by the ethic committee was necessary.The study was performed according to the standards set in the declaration of Helsinki 1975. All researchers were blinded from patient data during experimental analysis.

: J. Neumann is Associate Editor of BMC Cancer and thus member of the editorial board. All other authors have no potential competing interests and declare full transparency.

: Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.