"Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a bright future in the area of drug discovery and development", Prof. Howard Lee agreed. But, he went on saying, "The focus has been drug discovery, particularly de novo search of new 'drug-like' molecules, which came up with a mix of some successes and mostly failures." To Prof. Lee, there is a more important area where AI applications have not been tried much, and that is clinical development, more expensive, lengthy, and riskier. These statements were made at a K-Healthcare Business Forum, co-sponsored by Young Doctors, KBR, and KHIDI, on October 13, 2023.

In a speech entitled "AI-based drug development: Hype or Reality?", Prof. Lee explained why the application of AI technologies has been mostly limited to early stage or drug discovery, and how this can be expanded to the later phase of drug development such as preclinical toxicity prediction and more robust and efficient design and conduct of clinical trials. The details of Prof. Lee's talk can be found in this news paper article. 

On October 30, 2020, CCADD and collaborating investigators had a workshop at Pocheon, Kyeonggi-do, to celebrate the consecutive two-year success for the common data model (CDM) expansion project. In this workshop, Prof. Howard Lee, Yoomin Jeon, Sium Kim, and Tae Kyu Chung summarized the project outcomes in the second year.

In a session, Tae Kyu evaluated the mapping rates of clinical terminologies, collected from the eligibility criteria, efficacy, and safety outcomes in sampled clinical trials at clinicaltrials.gov, to CDM standardized vocabularies. On the other hand, Prof. Lee detailed the pros and cons of the CDM analytical tools, such as the Atlas and methods Library, which may be used to conduct clinical trial feasibility, efficacy, and safety analysis in a virtual, simulation setting. After the presentations, the workshop participants actively engaged in an interactive discussion how to leverage the potentials of CDM, while minimizing its limitations, to clinical trials. They further discussed the project management plan for the upcoming year to improve project design, setup, execution, and close-out.

The CDM expansion project has been sponsored since 2019 by Korea Health Industry Development Institute through a three-year grant totaling 77 million Korean Won or $66,000.