EPCAM and neoplasm: In T_EP, there was significant upregulation of genes associated with malignancy, such as EPCAM, HSPB1, CEACAM6, MUC1, and LY6E (Rehulkova et al., 2023; Huang et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2023; Jing et al., 2019; Yeom et al., 2016), implicating their roles in tumor initiation (Figure 2A; Supplementary Table S2).