Biology and clinical relevance of EpCAM
Authors:Laura Keller1,§, Stefan Werner1,§ and Klaus Pantel1
1 Institute of Tumor Biology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany.
§ These authors contributed equally to the work.
Keywords:
EpCAM, liquid biopsy, circulating tumor cells, EMT, Tumor biomarker, tumor cell dissemination.
Abbreviatons:
aa – amino acid,
CD – C-Domain,
CTC – circulating tumor cell,
CTE – congenital tufting enteropathy,
EMT – Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition,
EpCAM – epithelial cell adhesion molecule,
EV – extracellular vesicle,
KO – kockout,
RIP – Regulated Intramembrane Proteolysis,
TEM – tetraspanin-enriched microdomains,
TM – transmembrane,
TY – Thyroglobulin type 1A domain.
Corresponding Author(s):
Conflict of interest statement:
K.P. has ongoing patent applications related to circulat-ing tumor cells. K.P. has received honoraria from Agena, Novartis, Roche and Sanofi and research funding from European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) partners (Angle, Menarini and Ser-vier) of the CANCER-ID programme of the European Un-ion–EFPIA Innovative Medicines Initiative. L.K and S.W. declare no conflict of interest.
Please cite this article as:
Laura Keller, Stefan Werner and Klaus Pantel (2019). Biology and clinical relevance of EpCAM. Cell Stress 3(6): 165-180. doi: 10.15698/cst2019.06.188
© 2019 Keller et al. This is an open-access article released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows the unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduc-tion in any medium, provided the original author and source are acknowledged.
Abstract:
Epithelial cell adhesion molecule (EpCAM) is a transmembrane glycoprotein primarily known to mediate homotypic cell contacts in epithelia tissues. Because EpCAM expression is limited to normal and malignant epithelia, it has been used as diagnostic marker for the detection of carcinoma cells in mesenchymal organs such as blood, bone marrow or lymph nodes. In particular, the detection and molecular characterization of EpCAM-positive circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in the blood of carcinoma patients has gained considerable interest over the past ten years. EpCAM is primarily considered as an adhesion molecule, but recent studies have shown diverse biological functions including regulation of cell proliferation and cancer stemness. In this review, we summarize the current knowledge on the biological properties of EpCAM with emphasis on mechanisms involved in cancer progression and discuss the clinical implications of these findings for the clinical use of EpCAM as a diagnostic marker.