New Technology to Accelerate Diagnosis of Diabetic Kidney Disease

When protein levels or patterns change abnormally, diseases can develop and disrupt organ health. Understanding how proteins are organized within tissues can improve treatments and help minimize symptoms in conditions like diabetes-related kidney disease. Now, a new technology that maps the location of proteins inside cells could speed up the diagnosis and treatment of diabetes-related kidney disease.

The new technology called PathoPlex (short for pathology-oriented multiplexing) was developed by researchers at Michigan Medicine (Ann Arbor, MI, USA), along with a global team. The system maps the location of proteins across tissues to reveal disease-specific patterns. It works by combining images from multiple antibody-stained samples, then using advanced software to interpret protein distributions across different cell types.

PathoPlex was optimized to map more than 140 proteins from at least 40 tissue samples, advancing research efforts that were previously limited in their ability to analyze so many proteins simultaneously. The technology visualizes proteins using fluorescent antibody tags that glow under a microscope and then consolidates data into comprehensive tissue maps. By analyzing patterns in this way, researchers can study protein expression across healthy and diseased tissues with greater precision.

In a study published in Nature, the researchers demonstrated how PathoPlex could be applied in real-world scenarios. The researchers analyzed biopsy samples from individuals with diabetic kidney disease and identified disease-specific protein patterns that linked directly to organ dysfunction. They also found that the technology could reveal protein signatures in groups of healthy and damaged cells, highlighting how protein changes correlate with disease progression.

Importantly, PathoPlex uncovered kidney stress-related changes in people with type 2 diabetes before any visible signs of kidney disease emerged. The system also assessed how tissues might respond to specific drug treatments, suggesting that such analysis could accelerate both diagnosis and therapeutic strategies for patients. These findings underline the potential for protein mapping technologies to transform clinical research and patient care.

“PathoPlex paves the way towards understanding and imaging complex tissues in human diseases like diabetes,” said Matthias Kretzler, professor of internal medicine and member of the Caswell Diabetes Institute, who was part of the study team. “We can finally develop atlases that describe changes in protein functions and how to improve them with new treatments.”

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