Jung-Hyun Won was invited to the KOREA AI SUMMIT 2022 (“AI for Good”), where she presented the collaboration research project between CCADD (Siun Kim, Jung-Hyun Won, David Seung U Lee, and Prof. Howard) and Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) entitled “Revisiting and Reformulating Machine Learning-based Drug Repositioning”, orally and as a poster. The Korea AI Summit 2022, organized by AI Innovation Hub, Microsoft Research, IITP, and Korea University AI Research Institute, aimed to provide a platform for academic leaders from the prominent universities and institutes to share and explore the latest developments and technological trends in AI research.

Jung-Hyun Won stated that the team (i.e., CCADD and MSRA) has pointed out problems in the current task formulation of machine learning-based drug repositioning studies. According to Jung-Hyun Won, the team has found the spurious correlation between data collection pattern of drug characteristics and approved indications of drug. They also found that train-test split based on random sampling led to the overestimation of the performances of existing DR models. Jung-Hyun Won stressed that the team is currently reformulating drug repositioning problem as predicting investigational disease and generating eligibility criteria of clinical trials for a drug-disease pair.

Technology showcase can be watched the following youtube thumbnail.

Prof. Howard Lee gave an invited presentation at the annual conference 2020, sponsored by the Korean Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics. In his presentation, Prof. Lee summarized the various activities to develop therapeutics, mostly drug repositioning, and vaccines against the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide. Prof. Lee's talk was timely in that Pfizer recently announced the extraordinary efficacy seen in their phase III clinical trial with an mRNA vaccine that they had co-developed with BioNTech, a German biotech firm. Prof. Lee also discussed how the private-public partnership to develop vaccines to prevent COVID-19 could change the horizon of new drug development post-pandemic. 

In the upheaval caused by COVID-19 or the coronavirus, Dr. Lee stressed the importance of drug repositioning technology to develop a new treatment. In an interview with a KBS news program, Dr. Lee introduced the listener to the core concept of drug repositioning and explained why it could be life-saving in the midst of the chaotic COVID-19 pandemic. "Instead of finding new molecules or compounds from scratch, drug repositioning looks for test articles under active development or those fully developed for other indications, or even for those abandoned due to various reasons", Dr. Lee commented. 

So far, no treatment has been shown to be effective in treating patients with COVID-19. But, several compounds have been suggested as a potential treatment such as remdesivir by Gilead Sciences, for which ~80 drug repositioning clinical trials have already been commenced worldwide. The full video clip of Dr. Lee's interview can be found down below.