The scar that never felt a wound

Abstract

Chronic kidney disease is inevitably associated with the proliferation of fibroblasts following injury of the tubular system and collagen deposition in the interstitial tissue. To date, renal fibrosis has been hard to detect without histologic tissue examination. In this issue of Kidney International, Baues et al. introduce a novel technology for noninvasive detection of renal fibrosis using a multimodal optical approach with the fluorescent-labelled collagen-binding agent CNA35-Cy7.