Siun sought to understand the micro-environment of clinical trials and the dynamics of the pharmaceutical industry. The clinical trial, the most critical and expensive step in drug development, is an experiment that uates the safety and efficacy of drugs intended for human use. The design of clinical trials should be balanced between the two seemingly contradicting goals such as maximizing human subject protection vs. obtaining the information as much as possible, minimizing the economic burden vs. assuring the external validity of clinical trials. However, these goals that could shape the design of clinical trials are not clearly separable, and are actually overlapped. For instance, the public health care system and economic status, particularly the matureness of the pharmaceutical market of a country where a new drug is approved may affect the regulatory requirements of efficacy and safety data. Based on this understanding, Siun wanted to identify what distinguishes the development strategies of Korean pharmaceutical companies from those of global pharmaceutical firms and to find how the development strategies of the Korean pharmaceutical industry has emerged from the historical, social and cultural contexts.

During the 2022 Winter Internship program at CCADD, Heeju was introduced to the artificial intelligence (AI) technology actively applied to signal detection of drug-drug interaction, followed by some hands-on experience. This experience not only cemented Heeju’s interest in AI technology and its application to the drug development process, but led to her current research project about determining the equivalence margin in the phase 3 clinical trial of biosimilars.

As a student researcher at CCADD, Heeju seeks to better understand the limitations of the conventional drug development framework and explore diverse ways to speed up the process and drive down the cost.

Yoomin’s research focus is the development and application of new innovative convergent technologies to drastically upgrade the status quo of clinical trial practices including their design, conduct, management, analysis, and report. Yoomin is particularly interested in streamlining artificial intelligence technologies for new drug development to improve the efficiency of patient recruitment and protocol writing. Yoomin enjoys playing the cello and she is a pleasant concert-goer.  Yoomin also is a big fan of travel to different parts of the world.

Seo-rin has plenty of internship experiences. At Kyung Hee University's Instrumentation Analysis Center, Seo-rin learned how to use state-of-the-art equipment essential for pharmaceutical development and manufacturing. There, she received an award for the presentation on her research, which significantly deepened her passion for the pharmaceutical field. Moreover, she worked as an undergraduate researcher in the Preventive Medicine Laboratory at Gachon University College of Medicine, where she learned the basics of epidemiological studies and data science. Additionally, she had an opportunity to study AI applications during a team project, which expanded her vision for the future industries and deepened her understanding of its critical importance.

Jinyeong enjoys playing the piano, drawing and occasionally, cooking. She also likes to engage in outdoor activities.

Jun Sik plans to apply his mathematical perspectives to carve out practical areas, particularly connecting mathematical models and artificial intelligence in drug development. At CCADD, Jun Sik is looking forward to leveraging his mathematical skill sets to derive and develop innovative quantitative approaches that could enhance the efficiency of clinical drug development. 

His time as an intern at CCADD became a trigger that turned on his passion for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Being an AI aficionado, he is now part of the Small Grant Exploratory Research (SGER) project, trying his hand at extracting eligibility features for efficient patient recruitment in clinical trials through machine learning. 

As a student researcher, Duhyeong's interest lies in exploring various ways to apply statistical and machine learning methods for clinical trials and drug development process, and CCADD will be a perfect place for his interest to take wings. 

Jeong Ah studied chemistry for her BS degree at the University of Suwon (2007-2012). After graduation, she worked at the Department of Chemistry, the University of Suwon, as an administrative assistant and student experiment coordinator for six years. Since then, Jeong Ah has worked at the Industry-Academic Cooperation Foundation, Ajou University, in the capacity of research budget administrator for two years until she became part of CCADD. In her free time, Jung Ah enjoys practicing yoga and exploring new places.

Jung-Chun received her BS degree in economics at Sookmyung Women’s University (2002-2008). Previously, Jung Chun worked in the Korea Institute of Finance (KIF) as a secretary and research associate for eight years (2007-2014). Jung Chun enjoys watching movies, swimming, and spending time with her lovely daughter. 

Prior to that, Hyun A went to the University of Alabama (2001-2004), where she received a Bachelor’s degree in biology and mathematics. After completing her undergraduate course, Dr. Lee worked as a research scientist at the Center for Chemical Toxicology Research and Pharmacokinetics (CCTRP) in NCSU. Dr. Lee’s research area was physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) modeling and simulation to optimize new drug development. Dr. Lee had a lot of experience in PBPK modeling and simulation with new drugs. Dr. Lee was a leading senior research scientist in the field of PBPK modeling and simulation at Daewoong Pharmaceutical, Ltd. (2010-2015).

At PNU, Dr. Gim was involved in various research activities: identification, evolutionary study, and functional study of transposable elements in the animal genome, such as the horse, dog, monkey, and fish. During these studies, Dr. Gim acquired approach skills (experimental approach and in silico analysis) for analyzing diverse species of genome. Furthermore, Dr. Gim discovered Alzheimer's disease-related biomarkers using SNP, DNA methylation, evolution, and metabolomics. Dr. Gim provided integrated approaches that could lead to understanding Alzheimer's disease. Prior to joining CCADD, Dr. Gim performed NGS data analysis at UNIST, where he also served as the administrative manager of the Ulsan 10K Genome Project. In this capacity, Dr. Gim played a key role in combining multi-omics data (e.g., whole-genome re-sequencing, RNA-Seq, Methyl-Seq) in order to identify reliable omics markers for disease and aging. Dr. Gim's main research interests are the convergence between multi-omics data and other research fields, such as machine learning, artificial neural network, and artificial intelligence. At CCADD, Dr. Gim was very much keen on amalgamating innovative computer science technology with genomics.

Heechan is a registered pharmacist and graduated from the Department of Pharmacy, Chung-Ang University. He also attended the Department of Chemistry, Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH)  from Mar 2008 to Feb 2011.

Dr. Jung has received several research grants from the Ministry of Science, ICT and FuturePlanning. Dr. Jung’s current research interests include development of innovative convergent biomedical big data analysis using machine learning algorithms and AI-based smart recommendation system for clinical trials.