Figure 6. High prevalence of CD90⁺GPC3⁺ cells in CD90⁺CSCs derived from human HCC cell lines and liver tumors.

A significant increase in the number of CD90⁺GPC3⁺ cells were detected within CD90⁺ cell population of PLC and MHCC97L cells. (A) In PLC cells, 95.3% of CD90⁺ cells co-expressed GPC3. (B) In MHCC97L cells, 99.0% of CD90⁺ cells co-expressed GPC3. (C) Analysis of a representative pair of human liver tissues indicated that only 4.5% of CD90⁺ population expressed GPC3 in non-tumorous tissues, while 89.9% of CD90⁺ cells expressed GPC3 in the matched tumorous tissues (median, 86.4%; range, 54.2–91.0%; n = 5). These results demonstrated that GPC3 is distinctly expressed in liver CD90⁺CSCs.