Undergraduate experience in dental research: the Bachelor of Science (Dentistry) program at the University of Manitoba.

The faculty of dentistry at the University of Manitoba is charting new territory with the development of its undergraduate dental research experience. This program is one step in cultivating researcher-clinicians for the next era of dentistry. The current focus on training dental researcher-clinicians has its roots in the faculty’s past. Outstanding research alumni include Dr. Israel Kleinberg and Dr. Lorne Golub, who, along with others in Canada and elsewhere, have established the fundamental requirement for credibility in basic dental and biomedical research. At the faculty, we believe that the present and the future of dentistry lie in how we instill in our students the desire for knowledge of the most unique kind — that generated in the simplest of settings, by oneself. Research can be regarded not only as the creation of knowledge, but also as a foundation for future endeavours. Thus, no matter how humble the research, its future potential is both unknown and unlimited. In this vein, we are developing a program for the future of dentistry, one in which students will come to recognize the interdependence of oral and systemic health, to the benefit of their patients. In this article, I present 3 examples of groundbreaking research activities within the faculty, all involving undergraduate dental students who have undertaken original research as part of the Bachelor of Science (Dentistry) program. One particularly important feature of these activities is the broad spectrum of support that has been generated, the result being generous funding from various agencies, including the Heart and Stroke Foundation, the National Institutes of Health (United States), the Manitoba Institute of Child Health and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). Interdisciplinary Research on Caries Detection Among the numerous research activities within the faculty is a project involving an interdisciplinary team of scientists, engineers and clinicians who are developing novel methods for early detection and longitudinal monitoring of dental caries. The goal is to incorporate 2 optical methods, optical coherence tomography (OCT) and polarized Raman spectroscopy (PRS), into a single clinical probe to improve surveying of early white spot lesions (incipient caries). This research is led by scientists and engineers from the National Research Council’s Institute for Biodiagnostics, located in Winnipeg, including Lin-P’ing Choo-Smith (principal investigator), Mark Hewko, Alex Ko and Mike Sowa. The faculty of dentistry is providing clinical cariology input (from William Wiltshire and Colin Dawes), and collects human tooth samples (through the efforts of Cecilia Dong). To develop the clinical probe, the team is collaborating with a group of optical and electronic engineers from the National Optics Institute (Quebec City), led by Patrice Topart. In 2004, this newly formed consortium received a grant from the National Institutes of Health – National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research to develop the probe and validate research developments in preclinical in vivo studies. This grant follows on previous grants from the Manitoba Medical Service Foundation and the CIHR – Institute for Musculoskeletal Health and Arthritis (IMHA). A key element in the research activities on caries detection has been the participation of various undergraduate clinical students from the faculty and elsewhere. Through the faculty’s BSc (Dent) program, Raymond Zhu has investigated the capacity of OCT and PRS Undergraduate Experience in Dental Research: the Bachelor of Science (Dentistry) Program at the University of Manitoba