The use of plasma biomarker-derived clusters for clinicopathologic phenotyping: results from the Boston Kidney Biopsy Cohort.

Background: Protein biomarkers may provide insight into kidney disease pathology but their use for the identification of phenotypically distinct kidney diseases has not been evaluated.

Methods: We used unsupervised hierarchical clustering on 225 plasma biomarkers in 541 individuals enrolled into the Boston Kidney Biopsy Cohort, a prospective cohort study of individuals undergoing kidney biopsy with adjudicated histopathology. Using principal component analysis, we studied biomarker levels by cluster and examined differences in clinicopathologic diagnoses and histopathologic lesions across clusters.