In agreement with the earlier study of Akita et al. who showed that half of the tumors express EpCAM in low or non-detectable levels [18], expression of the extracellular domain of EpCAM was found in only 79% of pancreatic tumor samples [41] and a detailed analysis in a different sample set showed that 29% of the tumors were negative and 36% only weakly expressing EpCAM [42]. The gene discussed is EPCAM; the disease is pancreatic neoplasm.