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Jürgen Floege, Moderator's view: Will ‘modern’ urine proteomics replace ‘old-fashioned’ renal biopsy?, Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation, Volume 30, Issue 4, April 2015, Pages 538–540, https://doi.org/10.1093/ndt/gfv040
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In this Polar View, Richard Glassock [1] concludes that ‘…it is highly unlikely that the surge in biomarker technology development will lead to abandonment of renal biopsy as a useful clinical (and research) tool’. In contrast, Harald Mischak [2], in his response to Richard Glassock, considers a kidney biopsy to be currently unethical and possibly illegal as long as urine proteome and other options have not been exploited and as long as therapy cannot be based on the latter. It is important to keep in mind that Harald Mischak is co-founder and co-owner of Mosaiques Diagnostics GmbH, i.e. a company developing proteomic tests, and thus has a major conflict of interest. So far, I am not aware of any ethics committee decision or legal cases that follow Dr Mischak's line of arguments, and I strongly disagree with Dr Mischak's opinion that a renal biopsy is unethical or even illegal.
But rather than getting lost in a debate on opinions, let us have a look at the key arguments of the two opponents and see how they apply to both methods (Table 1).
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