Figure 1.

Requirements of a good biomarker for fluorescence image-guided surgery in the context of CD24. It should have (1) high tumor specificity with high abundance on tumor cells, and (2) the target should be absent in healthy tissue (3), while spatial and temporal intratumor heterogeneity should be low [13]. (4) It should have broad applicability to a wide variety of malignancies and (5) preferably extracellular target expression for better accessibility to widen its clinical applicability. EMT: epithelial–mesenchymal transition; CSCs: cancer stem cells