NGAL determination allows kidney injury to be detected shortly after it occurs and not just at a later stage when the injury has led to impaired kidney function or actual failure. NGAL is the earliest responding biomarker for acute kidney injury (AKI) in humans and has also shown promise in rodent models.

Dogs provide additional information in the study of kidney function, surgical procedures and treatment in relation to human disease, and canine studies continue to be important in drug development.

Up to now only invasive methods (biopsies and histopathology) have been available to determine kidney damage, as serum creatinine is a rather slowly responding and relatively unspecific marker of the decline in kidney function that may result from injury.

The dog NGAL test is non-invasive, gives an early indication of kidney damage, uses little sample and is easy to perform. The test can potentially be used to measure drug efficacy in the development of new treatments for kidney damage, to assess safety or nephrotoxic side effects of new drugs, and can be used in basic research on kidney injury and kidney diseases.

NGAL measurement in dogs may prove to be of considerable value in the preclinical evaluation of new pharmaceutical products, as it is much cheaper and easier to perform than microscopic examination of the kidney, which has hitherto been the usual procedure. Since BioPorto’s launch of the first human NGAL ELISA kit, there has been a constant demand for animal NGAL ELISAs from the pharmaceutical industry and the CROs (Contract Research Organizations) that carry out the majority of the industry’s testing, as well as from large publicly funded research institutions.

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