NGAL determination allows kidney injury to be detected almost as soon as it occurs, and not at the later stage when the consequences of impaired kidney function can be detected by existing routine tests and the damage has been consolidated.

It is expected that the availability of NGAL ELISAs for both animals and human patients will show synergic effects. The good results already obtained in patients have stimulated the demand for NGAL tests in animals. It is also expected that NGAL research in laboratory animals will promote an increased routine use of NGAL determinations in patients. The launching of this new rat NGAL test is therefore also expected to have a positive effect on the human NGAL market.

Rats are among the most frequently used laboratory animals for research on kidney damage. The rat NGAL test can thus be used in the development of new treatments for kidney damage, to detect nephrotoxic side effects of new drugs, and for basic science research on kidney injury and kidney diseases.

It is therefore expected that the use of NGAL as a toxicological marker of kidney damage in rats could prove to be of considerable importance in the preclinical evaluation of new pharmacological products, as it is much cheaper and easier to determine NGAL than to carry out a microscopic examination of the kidney itself, which is the typical experimental end-point today. BioPorto’s Diagnostics expectations are supported by an incipient demand for animal NGAL ELISAs from the pharmaceutical industry and the CROs (contract research organizations) that carry out much of the industry’s testing, as well as from large publicly-funded international research institutions.