EPCAM and breast cancer: In previous works, after depleting the EpCAM+ and CD45+ cell populations from blood samples of patients with early stage breast cancers, overexpression of the EMT inducing transcription factors TWIST1, SNAIL1, SLUG, ZEB1 and FOXC2 was observed in a significantly higher fraction of patients receiving neoadjuvant therapy compared to those not candidate to multimodal treatment [161].