Cancer research changed my life because it defined the trajectory of my training and my career.
Right now, I’m at the end of my MD/PhD training. I’m going through clinical rotations and I’m in the leukemia clinic seeing patients. Something I appreciate is how profoundly things like genomics have an impact on cancer care.
Some of the patients I see look perfectly healthy. But because of the mutation they have, they are at high risk and they’re going to pass away within a year if we don’t do something about it.
That new way of looking at cancer, by thinking about genomics, has really stuck with me.
It was something that really clicked over a decade ago when I was a co-op student at BC Cancer and a first-year undergrad. There was an excitement across the entire field about the promise of precision medicine — about understanding what mutations a patient might have and how that might change their treatment.
It’s astounding to see how much has changed in just over a decade since then, in terms of how we manage these patients. That’s been a tremendous motivator throughout my undergrad and into my PhD, where I study cancer heterogeneity and I try to advance precision medicine.
Seeing that connection to the clinic has been so gratifying and so exciting. It really is a flame that I’ll take forward with me into my career as a clinician scientist.
Andy Zeng is a senior MD/PhD student at the University of Toronto. He grew up near Vancouver, British Columbia and relocated to Toronto for his combined MD/PhD training. Andy completed his PhD under the supervision of John Dick where he used computational and experimental approaches to study hematopoietic stem cells and acute leukemia. He is passionate about applying cutting edge technologies to advance precision medicine and improve therapy selection in leukemia. Nowadays, he is wrapping up his medical studies and looks forward to starting residency training in 2026.