Biomarker can exclude acute kidney injury

Peer-reviewed data on the biological variation of four AKI biomarker tests in 85 patients with stable heart disease (enrolled in the Valsartan Heart Failure Trial) presented by Dr. Alan Wu (UCLA, San Francisco) at the 24th International Conference on Advances in Critical Care Nephrology (San Diego) demonstrated that sphingotec GmbH‘s glomerular filtration marker is not only suitable for therapy monitoring but is the very first critical care biomarker physicians can use to rule out akute kidney failure (AKI) in clinical routine. About 25% - 30% of patients admitted to intensive care units (ICUs) have AKI. So far, there was no biomarker test able to diagnose AKI as early as at admission. and thus to guide therapy decision. Commenting on the results, key opinion leaders suggested to add penKid measurements to AKI routine testing for triaging and monitoring.

"The biovariability of a biomarker is a key attribute, but not tested for many of the novel kidney markers. penKid shows a low variability – allowing information with the first measurement," said Dr. Wu. "penKid has a huge value to rule out patients in EDs," confirmed Prof. Salvatore Di Somma, Head of Emergency Medicine Sant'Andrea Hospital, Rome, Italy. sphingotec also showed data from pilot routine testing, which has already begun at undisclosed ICUs and EDs in Germany. Study leaders confirmed that triaging will be supported by penKid information, because the marker can rule out AKI as BNP rules out Heart Failure. 

Plasma penKid is a surrogate marker for disturbed renal glomerular filtration rate (GFR), which reflects kidney function. Previous studies on more than 30,000 critically ill patients admitted to EDs or ICUs with congestive heart failure or sepsis demonstrated that penKid levels change dynamically with the actual kidney function independently from comorbidities or inflammation. penKid levels rise up to 48 hours prior to those of creatinine preceding kidney injury (AKI).

sphingotec said that it will launch a penKid point-of-care (POC) test running on its fully automated Nexus IB10 POC testing platform for use in EDs and ICUs by the end of H1/2019 The platform allows measurement of up to five critical care biomarker tests in one run within 20 minutes without any sample preparation.