Xinchen Wang, a 3rd year Biochemistry student, was one of the lucky few that got down and dirty with scientific research this summer. He was the only U of T student to receive a 2008 Summer Research Fellowship with the Ontario Genomics Intitute (OGI), along with six other students around the province.

This highly regarded Fellowship, which has been offered for the past six years, is intended to promote research in the fields of genomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics. Students are given the opportunity to participate in meaningful research under the supervision of an expert in a genomics-related field.

Wang’s research involved the use of microarrays to predict acute lung injury (ALI) in transplant patients using tissue samples from donor lungs.

“It’s about 75-80 per cent accurate. Right now, we’re using both rat and mouse models, but to actually predict ALI, we used human library data sets. We looked at genes that were commonly expressed in all sorts of studies, the most statistically robust. Hopefully it’ll apply to actual people so that we can test the tissues before transplantation to see which lungs should be transplanted and which should be thrown out,” Wang explains.

In addition to being able to conduct clinically relevant work, the OGI Summer Fellowship also provides the chance to discuss projects with other fellows in the program every two weeks. “It feels more personal, because this year we only had seven people. You get to talk to them, and you actually learn a lot more because you get exposed to what everyone else is doing in their different fields. It was a lot better than the one I took last year, the Summer Student Program at St. Michael’s Hospital, because even though you met every week, there were three hundred people in the program.”

The OGI Fellowship consists of a mandatory orientation session, journal club meetings, and an opportunity to present your research at the end of the summer.

Besides research experience, Wang also believes the Fellowship gave him invaluable insight into the scientific private sector: “OGI is a not-for-profit organization in the private sector, so they aren’t as academic as St. Mike’s, or [Toronto General Hospital]. It’s kind of nice to see how the world is like outside of academic research, because that’s rare to see in your undergraduate experience.”

One of the goals of this summer fellowship is to cultivate undergraduate interest in genomics or bioinformatics. Although Wang still finds himself switching subject POSts every two months, he displays a strong passion for clinical research. “If I’m going to do research, I’d like it to be something applicable to people,” Wang says candidly, “but I’m probably going to change my mind again from now and when I graduate.”