Chandra Mohan, Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Endowed Professor of biomedical engineering, is reporting the first use of the powerful imaging mass cytometry (IMC) to examine the kidneys of patients with lupus (systemic lupus erythematosus), an autoimmune disease that can affect multiple organs and become fatal, and to diagnose lupus nephritis (LN) in those patients.
LN is a severe inflammation of the kidneys and a major cause of death in lupus patients. Up to 60% of SLE patients will develop renal symptoms with 5–20% of those patients progressing to end stage kidney disease within 10 years.
IMC can showcase the presence of as many as 37 different proteins in human tissue simultaneously and marks a significant leap beyond the limitations of the traditional approach, which allowed the examination of only 1-3 distinct proteins within a specific tissue. Often in combination with machine learning algorithms, IMC has been used to characterize the cellular makeup of the human kidney, distinguish between cell types and identify novel markers for disease.
“Due to unique advantages that allow high-dimensional tissue profiling, we postulated imaging mass cytometry may shed novel insights on the molecular makeup of proliferative lupus nephritis,” reports Mohan in the journal Clinical Immunology. “This study interrogates the expression profiles of 50 target proteins in lupus nephritis and control kidneys.”
Currently, the standard for LN diagnosis is a