Similarly, in primary tumors and during metastases formation, carcinoma cells are characterized by substantial molecular heterogeneity and undergo phenotypic changes along the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) (Thiery et al., 2009; Thiery and Lim, 2013; Ye and Weinberg, 2015), which are associated with frequent loss of EpCAM in circulating and disseminated tumor cells (Brown et al., 2021; Gires et al., 2020; Gorges et al., 2012; Keller et al., 2019; Liu et al., 2019). Here, EPCAM is linked to neoplasm.