Tejaswini Kulkarni, M.D., M.P.H.

Tejaswini Kulkarni, M.D., M.P.H., the Director of the Interstitial Lung Disease (ILD) Program at UAB, champions efforts to provide quality clinical care to patients with ILD at her center. Dr. Kulkarni is currently principal/co-investigator on clinical trials studying new therapeutics for ILD, and her research focuses on developing imaging biomarkers to predict and assess response to therapy among these patients.

ILDs represent a group of fibro-inflammatory disorders that occur following variety of exposures, in association with systemic diseases, typically autoimmune conditions, or, in some cases like idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), without known cause. Currently approved antifibrotic therapies are expensive, have numerous side effects and have limited efficacy. Other therapies, including immunosuppression, are largely based on retrospective studies, except for scleroderma-related ILD and progressive pulmonary fibrosis. Thus, there is an urgent need for new therapies and adaption of innovative clinical trial platforms for fibrotic ILDs.

As UAB’s ILD Program Director, Dr. Kulkarni has joined as a key member of an international collaborative effort to design, plan, and develop the REMAP-ILD clinical trial. REMAP-ILD, or the Randomized, Embedded, Multifactorial, Adaptive Platform Trial for Interstitial Lung Disease, is a new global network of leading experts, institutions and research networks invested in advancing care for patients with fibrotic ILDs. REMAP-ILD’s goal is to design an international adaptive platform clinical trial, which can accelerate the assessment of therapies for fibrotic ILD patients by testing multiple interventions within multiple patient strata simultaneously; potentially improving outcomes in patients with Lukusa-Sawalenith fibrotic ILDs.