What is urine protein electrophoresis (UPEP) and is it still used?

[Music] what is urine protein electrophoresis or you pep and is it still used it's like the skeletal survey urine evaluation of free light of Bence Jones protein area is probably something that we can move beyond I think the serum free light chain assay in many ways has supplanted urine analysis of monoclonal protein that said it still remains a criteria for clinical trials and is relevant to obtain in the context of clinical trials in clinical practice less so you pep stands for urine protein electrophoresis whenever somebody has a plasma cell disorder whether it be M Gus or myeloma or amyloid the cancer cells are making a normal protein that's being released into the blood and this protein tends to float in the blood and we can pick up this protein by an s prep and an immuno fixation but all of this protein gets processed by the kidneys and whenever the kidney is damaged or the kidney has reached maximum capacity of processing this protein it's gonna be dumping it in the urine so we can identify and pick up this protein in the urine at times before we had free light chains as a test that we could use regularly for blood we had to rely on you pepper because we had cases of patients who did not have any detectable spen or abnormal protein in the blood but we were finding it in the urine because that's where I was being concentrated so that is something that we're still doing for several reasons one there we want to make sure that when somebody's being diagnosed that we have turned all stones and made sure that we looked everywhere so if we find it in the in the blood we also want to make sure if it's detectable in the urine or not that's a baseline we don't need to use it on a regular basis while we're treating patients but then it's also very important to use it whenever we're confirming a remission if we're suspect that somebody's in remission and we don't detect that a protein in the blood we want to make sure that we do au pep to see if we still detect that in the urine or if it's been cleared by the urine as well and that way we can be guaranteed that the patient has met the criteria for a remission and what depth of remission they've achieved but to be honest you pep is a test that is now facing out little by little and Feli chants are taking over that test we still are going to be using it a lot of the times and one of the reasons why we do it is more for study purposes a lot of the clinical trials that have been done in multiple myeloma relied heavily on you peps back in the days and if we want to be comparing data from now to data from back in the days we want to be using similar variables and you pip is one of those tests that we want to be using as a constant during those studies [Music]