The current check for kidney disease is a simple blood test for
serum creatinine, but it can take longer than two days for this
metabolite to accumulate to levels that are significant enough
to indicate kidney damage - and by then it may be too late to
intervene. To close the gap between injury and diagnosis, a team
of basic scientists and physicians led by Dr. Jonathan Barasch,
M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of medicine and cell biology,
Dr. Neal Paragas, a postdoctoral fellow, and Dr. Andong Qiu, an
associate research scientist at Columbia University Medical
Center, has created a "reporter mouse" - a genetically
engineered bioluminescent animal capable of illuminating the
onset and the time course of kidney damage by the generation of
light. In a paper published online this month in the journal
Nature Medicine, Drs. Barasch, Paragas and Qiu report a
technique to detect in a living mouse the appearance of a
protein that is activated only when the kidney is bombarded with
stimuli that cause sudden kidney in