EPCAM and cancer: CTCs are the seeds of distant metastasis of cancer,32 and have been confirmed in many studies to be related to the poor prognosis of various cancers, including lung,16–18 breast,19,33 colorectal34 and prostate cancer.35 In our study, 94.3% of patients with stage IB LUAD contained ≥1 CTC in 7.5 mL of blood, which was significantly higher than the positive rates reported by Hofman36 and Blackhall16 using traditional EpCAM-mediated CTC capture methods.