Biomarker Panel Array Systems for Disease Detection

Lupus nephritis (LN) is a devastating chronic kidney disease (CKD) caused by Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), an autoimmune disease that involves a loss of immune tolerance to endogenous materials and causes inflammatory responses and multiple organ damage. Currently, invasive renal biopsy as the gold standard diagnosis for LN may cause kidney injury, especially for multiple biopsy tests. Moreover, the histopathological morphology classification system doesn’t stratify the heterogenous nature of lupus patients. Fortunately, serum and urine biomarkers could potentially serve as a surrogate of disease activity, and a biomarker panel composed of multiple biomarkers could largely improve the diagnostic or prognostic sensitivity and specificity. By applying a LN biomarker panel on a multiplexable protein microarray platform, we aim to build a robust, highly sensitive, multiplexed, and high-throughput point-of-care system for lupus nephritis.

This research covers four sections: (1) Discovery of novel circulating immune complexes (ICx) in the serum of lupus nephritis as potential biomarkers. Immunoproteomics-based discovery studies combined with Bioinformatics-assisted selection have enabled us to identify circulating immune complexes as potential biomarkers of LN. (2) Discovery of novel serum biomarkers that have diagnostic or predictive value in lupus nephritis. A novel serum biomarker VSIG4 has been discovered using proteomics and further validated as a promising novel serum biomarker of lupus nephritis and renal pathology activity. (3) Development of a Point-of-Care serum Biomarker-Panel Mini-Array (BPMA) system for the diagnosis, disease monitoring, and flare prediction of lupus nephritis; BPMA-S6 has been developed as a novel promising POC device for LN diagnosis, disease monitoring and flare prediction of LN (4) Discovery of novel urine biomarkers and biomarker-panel that have diagnostic or predictive values or disease monitoring capability for lupus nephritis.

Collectively, this study has led to the discovery of novel biomarkers, the identification of a novel 6-plex biomarker panel, and the development of a novel biomarker panel detection system for autoimmune kidney disease. These findings hold great promise for the next generation of home care and community medicine.