Urine Test for Kidney Disease

The test, developed by Vishal Vaidya and colleagues, measures the urinary biomarker of a molecule known as Kim-1, which has been shown to better indicate a range of renal conditions over other conventional biomarkers such as blood urea nitrogen, serum creatinine, and urinary enzymes. The new assay displays visual indicators in minutes, which is a significant improvement from older analyses which require a large analyzer and take several hours.

The kidney is highly susceptible to injury due to various disease states, a wide range of drugs, environmental pollutants, and other conditions. The incidence of kidney injury is steadily increasing across the population and contributes to high mortality and increasing numbers of individuals with end-stage kidney disease. This assay has potential to diagnose kidney disease quickly and early enough to provide timely therapeutic intervention, and could also be used in the future to safely screen for agents which are potentially nephrotoxic in preclinical and clinical settings.

Author contact:

Vishal S. Vaidya (Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA)
E-mail: vvaidya@partners.org

Abstract available online.

 (C) Kidney International press release.

Message posted by: Trevor M. D'Souza