Importantly, the biomarker panel has been validated in a multicentric approach involving >1000 blinded samples. The accuracy was high (96% sensitivity and 98% specificity), when evaluating only the diabetic patients in the test-set. To test the CKD273 pat-tern as a tool for early detection of DN, we recently performed an independent longitudinal study of normoalbuminuric diabetic patients at inclusion. The urinary CKD273 pattern distinguished progressing patients from non-progressing patients. The corresponding receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis resulted in an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.925 assuming a prevalence of 30% for DN. The positive predictive value was 97% and the negative predictive value was 88%. The specificity of the CKD273 pattern was further evaluated in patients without any evidence for renal impairment based on clinical history, creatinine, or urinary protein levels resulting in an overall specificity of 98%.