.png)
.png)
Professor
Johns Hopkins
Disclosure(s): Fujirebio Diagnostics, Inc., USA: Grant/Research Support; Novobiotic LLC, USA: Grant/Research Support; T3 Pharma, Switzerland: Grant/Research Support
Sanjay K Jain, MD is Professor of Pediatrics, Radiology & Radiological Sciences and International Health at the Johns Hopkins University. He directs the Center for Infection and Inflammation Imaging Research and is a member of the Center for TB Research at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Jain also directs the Pediatric Infectious Diseases fellowship program. His primary research interests include the development of novel imaging technologies for bacterial infections, pediatric tuberculosis (TB), TB meningitis and developing low-cost technologies to improve health of children in the developing world. Of note, he led the team that treated a 2 year old young US-child, with extensively drug-resistant (XDR) TB, which is extremely dangerous and challenging to treat. Dr. Jain’s laboratory utilizes small animal models to develop and test novel radiopharmaceutical imaging methods (CT, PET, SPECT) to diagnose and monitor infections and to study disease pathogenesis. Several novel tracers developed in his laboratory are now being tested in first-in-human studies. For example, they have performed first-in-human studies using a radiolabeled version of rifampin (an important antibiotic) in humans with TB or S. aureus infections to test whether rifampin achieves adequate levels at the infections sites. Similarly, we have also evaluated a novel bacterial-specific PET tracer to noninvasively detect infections due to Enterobacterales in humans, the most common cause of Gram-negative bacterial infections in humans and a frequent cause of serious multidrug-resistant infections.
Dr. Jain is funded though several grants. Notably, he is also the recipient of the prestigious NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (2009) and the NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award (2014). Dr. Jain is the past chair (2014-2021) of the Infectious Diseases subgroup at the World Molecular Imaging Society and serves as a reviewer for multiple scientific journals and NIH study panels.