There’s good news today for the more than 30,000 people receiving life-saving kidney transplants globally each year. Carlsbad, California-based Invitrogen aims to improve life after transplant with a new biomarker tool that addresses two chronic and life-threatening challenges: kidney rejection triggered by the graft and the cumulative cell and tissue damage caused by immunosuppressive drugs that attempt to preserve the graft.
Until now, invasive and expensive procedures, such as biopsy, have been required to conclusively diagnose rejection. Invitrogen is hoping to change all that by providing an alternative test to help researchers in the development of studies that utilize urine biomarkers and track therapies early in the course of rejection.
Dr. Brian D. Shames, Assistant Professor of Surgery, Division of Transplant Surgery at the Medical College of Wisconsin says, “Development of a non-invasive test that could help differentiate between acute renal injury, rejection, and infection would satisfy a critical unmet need in transplantation. A biomarker test that can accomplish this would be of extreme importance in pre-clinical kidney transplantation research.”
By measuring levels of cytokines, chemokines and receptor levels in urine, Invitrogen’s PlexMark 3 Renal Biomarker Panel Assay appears to have accomplished just that by enabling researchers to better understand immune function and response without requiring invasive and expensive procedures, such as biopsies used to obtain kidney tissue samples.