Dr. Shashi Kant, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Pulmonary Immunology at the Center for Biomedical Research, UT Health Science Center at Tyler, School of Medicine at UT Tyler. He has 20+ years of research experience particularly in the area of tuberculosis and nontuberculous mycobacterial lung disease. Prior to joining UT Health Science Center at Tyler, he has worked at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, Baylor Scott & White Research Institute at Dallas, Texas Tech University Health Science at Dallas. His research program is supported by grants from NIH and host institution, is member of ASM, ATS, IDSA, serves as an expert on several NIH grant review panels, and reviewer for peer-reviewed journals in the field of infectious diseases.

His research is focused on infectious diseases and experimental therapeutics, with emphasis on Mycobacterium tuberculosis and nontuberculous mycobacteria, namely M. avium complex, M. kansasii, and M. abscessus. One of the goals of his research program is to design safe, effective, and oral short-course treatment regimens for these hard-to-treat infections. Among the highlights of his research program is the pre-clinical hollow fiber system model to perform pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic studies, extensive use of mathematical modeling and simulations, genomics and transcriptomic technologies to translate the laboratory findings to clinics i.e, “bench-to-bedside”.

Dr. Kant is well recognized in the research community for his “bench-to-bedside” research that is aimed to design safe, effective and short-course treatment regimens for drug resistant tuberculosis and to this end several of the regimens he developed for pediatric multidrug resistant tuberculosis as well as for adults over the years in collaboration with scientist across world, have been advanced to clinical use. He has authored >120 papers, and one of his models for pre-clinical tuberculosis drug development is approved by the European Medicines Agency and editorially endorsed by the USA Food and Drug Administration.

He is passionate about addressing health care issues including cost, access to quality care and strategies that can bridge the gap between pre-clinical to clinical development of therapeutics. In his personal life, Dr. Kant is married for 15 years, resides in Mansfield, Texas, and enjoys spending time with his two kids and wife who is a science educator.

The list of publications (name appears as Shashikant Srivastava) can be found here.

At UTHSCT, we are always open to new collaborations.