EPCAM and hepatocellular carcinoma: In HCC, several studies have shown that EpCAM is enriched in CSCs of HCC origin and that EpCAM-expressing HCC cells share more stem cell characteristics, have greater invasive, as well as tumor formation ability compared with EpCAM-negative cells (Schmelzer and Reid, 2008; Yang et al., 2008; Yamashita et al., 2008, 2009; Kimura et al., 2010; Li et al., 2016).