Lupus nephritis biomarkers

Lupus nephritis (LN), a potentially destructive outcome of SLE, is a real challenge in the management of SLE because of the difficulty in diagnosing its subclinical onset and identifying relapses before serious complications set in. Conventional clinical parameters such as proteinuria, GFR, urine sediments, anti-dsDNA and complement levels are not sensitive or specific enough for detecting ongoing disease activity in lupus kidneys and early relapse of nephritis. There has long been a need for biomarkers of disease activity in LN. Such markers ideally should be capable of predicting early sub-clinical flares and could be used to gauge response to therapy, thus obviating the need for serial renal biopsies with their possible hazardous complications. Since urine can be readily obtained, it lends itself as an obvious biological substrate. In this review, the use of urine and serum as sources of lupus nephritis biomarkers is described, and the results of biomarker discovery studies using candidate and proteomic approaches are summarized.