Furthermore, we compared the ROC curves between all biomarkers analyzed for the cohorts of DKD (Supplementary Table 1) and LN (Supplementary Table 2) patients, and we found that in DKD patients the AUC was significantly different when comparing ASC with EGF (p = 2.12E − 05), ASC with NGAL (p = 0.0009), CRP with EGF (p = 0.03), CRP with NGAL (p = 2.29E − 06), uPA with EGF (p = 0.001), and uPA with NGAL (p = 0.003) (Supplementary Table 1), indicating that based on the AUC, in DKD, NGAL as a biomarker is consistently different to several of the other biomarkers analyzed. Here, LCN2 is linked to diabetic kidney disease.