Dr. Kari Sant Happy to Bring Her Environmental and Zebrafish Research Back Home

By Chuck Carlson

Kari Sant is back home.

Yes, she spent the last six years at the San Diego State University, where the weather was perfect and the work was satisfying and challenging, but….

“I’m a Michigander man,” she said with a laugh. “I always wanted to come home. I loved it there, but it wasn’t home.”

She was born in Ann Arbor, graduated high school in Walled Lake, and earned her B.S. in Biology and Programming in the Environment, a Masters in Public Health in Environmental Health Sciences, and her Ph.D. in Toxicology at the University of Michigan. Her original goal, she relates with some irony, was to attend Michigan State University and become a veterinarian.

But life changes and goals evolve. When Dr. Sant landed her first professional experience outside her native state -- a post-doctoral position at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst -- it was time to see what the rest of the world had to offer.

The result for her was eye-opening research opportunities as a reproduction and human development toxicologist and, more specifically, studying the impact of the environment on humans and vice versa.

“When I got my first position starting on research, I realized I really liked research,” she said. “I got the bug when I got my first project and started analyzing my own data and getting to tell people about the cool findings I got in the lab.”

And with her interest in public health and the environment, the pieces fell into place.

“I’ve always been interested in the interaction between humans and the environment and, specifically, how things we’re doing to the environment can affect human health, especially in pregnancy,” she said. “The ability to show people how the environment can also affect their lives, I think, can make it more translational and get people more enthusiastic about solving environmental issues.”

That interest and the opportunity to expand on that work brought her back home and to a position in MSU’s Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology.

“This department always had an amazing reputation,” she said. “Also, I met a lot of the people here through the Society of Toxicology, so there was a bunch of professional interactions. I always had a relationship, and I respected this department. And I wanted to be in a toxicology department vs. a department of public health (as in San Diego). Also, the veterinary school is world class, and for me doing my type of research, there’s no better place to be. It’s kind of full circle for me.”

And that’s the research she is pursuing, with the help of a finger-length fish with a black stripe that can provide answers to so many questions.

Dr. Sant joined MSU’s PhmTox department in August. She will build up her own lab and research program, but has already started to develop collaborations. Of note, she will team with Dr. Chuck Williams in MSU’s College of Human Medicine to study the embryos of zebrafish eggs.

While most people are familiar with the ubiquitous zebrafish from pet shops, it’s likely most don’t realize these tiny fish share more than 70 percent of their genes with humans. More importantly for the research of Dr. Sant and Dr. Williams, they lay prodigious amounts of eggs every day, which makes them ideal for various research targets.

“Structurally, they’re very similar through embryonic development to a human,” Dr. Sant said.

And they have been popular, and continue to gain in popularity as a substitute for mammalian testing models.

“Zebrafish are super-hot in research right now and the writing’s been on the wall for a long time that they’re here to stay,” Dr. Sant said. “They lay hundreds of eggs a day, and it’s a really good high throughput model for toxicological research. It’s gives me the ability to screen a bunch of different compounds.”

She said studying zebrafish are also great for understanding human health and can provide valuable information about what may be happening to sea life when it’s exposed to environmental pollutants.

Dr. Williams learned of the research benefits of zebrafish in 2002 in his postdoc work at Vanderbilt University.

“In my experience, there have been hundreds of fish embryos worth of data,” he said. “And you can’t do that with mice. They’re small, easy to work with but a lot more relevant.”

Both Dr. Sant and Dr. Williams work with zebrafish eggs and embryos, not the adult fish which, Dr. Sant said, “can live their best lives. They can swim, eat, lay eggs. They get to party in a tank with all their food provided.”

As a result, the renovated lab they share is full of fish tanks that, eventually, will house thousands of fish. And it’s the opportunity Dr. Sant has been seeking.

“I’m very much a reproduction and development specialist,” said Dr. Sant, who is also interested in pediatric metabolic diseases like diabetes and obesity. “The type of research being done (in PhmTox) in cancer, in hypertension, in cardiovascular health, play a role in the types of things I study as well. I’m on the fringe of it but I get the benefit of my colleagues who are way smarter than me that I can lean on for good collaboration.”

Dr. Sant’s research will add to the department’s growing research capabilities, said department Chairperson Dr. Anne Dorrance.

“I am really excited to have Kari join the PhmTox team,” she said. “I love the energy she brings to our department and her interest in community service and outreach will no doubt take us all to new places. Kari's research expands our portfolio of animal models of disease, and I am excited to see how her own research and her collaborations develop. I am also delighted that PhmTox was able to team with the Department of Medicine to expand the zebrafish facility that already existed in the Institute for Quantitative Biology.”

Along with her work with zebrafish, Dr. Sant is also passionate about community/service-oriented environmental research.

“When there’s a new environmental concern that crops up in our backyards, and people want answers on what to do and if they need to worry, we want to be able to screen for that,” she said.

For Dr. Sant, returning to Michigan and getting the opportunity to advance her work at MSU, is a dream come true. Her parents still live in the state, and she is surrounded by family almost from one end to the other.

But, as with so many researchers, it’s the work that drives her.

“I want to do important research; research that helps solve a problem,” she said. “Are the new targets I find able to protect against disease? These new chemical compounds? These are things in our backyard and hopefully we can move toward getting them cleaned up and assuage some of the general public’s anxiety. I want to help close the gap and help protect our environment as well as the people and creatures living in it.”