Kidney disease affects more than 10% of adults worldwide but is hardly detected at early stages with conventional renal function biomarkers. To improve the fundamental understanding of kidney disease, it is highly desired to develop a low-cost, high-sensitivity preclinical imaging technique that can not only identify kidney dysfunction at early stages but also differentiate between the stages of kidney dysfunction. As a low cost technique, in vivo fluorescence imaging has been widely used for studying many diseases such as cancer; however, noninvasive fluorescence imaging of kidney function is challenging due to low kidney-contrast enhancement of organic dyes. Here, we report that rapid and persistent accumulation of conventional dyes in the skin “shadowed” real fluorescence signals from the kidneys and prevented noninvasive imaging of kidney function, which can be addressed with renal clearable near infrared emitting gold nanoparticles. By integrating near infrared emission with efficient renal clearance and ultralow background interference, gold nanoparticles can increase kidney contrast enhancement by 50 fold over near-infrared fluorophore IRDye 800CW. Furthermore, noninvasive fluorescence kidney functional imaging, enabled by renal clearable near infrared emitting gold nanoparticles, can noninvasively detect kidney dysfunction, report on the dysfunctional stages, and even reveal adaptive function in a mouse model of unilateral obstructive nephropathy, which cannot be diagnosed with routine renal function markers. These results demonstrate that low cost fluorescence kidney functional imaging is highly sensitive and useful for the longitudinal, noninvasive monitoring of kidney dysfunction progression in preclinical research.

Noninvasive fluorescence kidney functional imaging enabled by renal clearable luminescent gold nanoparticles

256th National Meeting (2018)

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