Urinary Vimentin mRNA as a Potential Novel Biomarker of Renal Fibrosis

Renal fibrosisis a histological outcome of chronic kidney disease (CKD) progression. However, the noninvasive detection of renal fibrosisremains a challenge. Here we constructed a renal fibrosistarget mRNA array and used it to detect urinary mRNAs of CKD patients for investigating potential noninvasive biomarkers of renal fibrosis. We collected urine samples from 39 biopsy-proven CKD patients and 11 healthy controls in the training set. Urinary mRNA profiles of 86 genes showed a total of 21 mRNAs that were differentially expressed between CKD patients and controls (P < 0.05), and vimentin (VIM) mRNA demonstrated the highest change fold of 9.99 in CKD vs. controls with robust correlations with decline of renal function and severity of tubulointerstitial fibrosis. Additionally, VIM mRNA further differentiated patients with moderate-to-severe fibrosisfrom none-to-mild fibrosisgroup with an area of the curve of 0.796 (P = 0.008). A verification of VIM mRNA in the urine of an additional 96 patients and 20...