CCADD members attended the Annual Conference of the Korean Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics (KSCPT), taking place at Sono Belle, Gyeongju, from November 16th to 17th. In this conference, approximately 300 participants shared their insights and findings in the translational pharmacometrics and new drug development realms. 

Representing CCADD, graduate students Tae Kyu and Yoona have delivered oral presentations on the latest advancements in clinical pharmacology and related scientific disciplines at the Conference.

Tae Kyu's oral presentation, centered around the research entitled "Comparison of Machine Learning and Population Pharmacokinetic Models for Predicting Antiepileptic Drug Concentrations Based on Therapeutic Drug Monitoring Records," acquired substantial attention, particularly from pharmacometricians. During the presentation and subsequent discussions, he shared insights on how the application of machine learning to clinical pharmacology holds the potential to revolutionize drug development, dosage optimization, and personalized medicine. 

Yoona also presented her research topic, entitled "Country Contribution of Investigators to Pivotal Clinical Trials and THeir Primary Publications of New Drugs Approved by the US Food and Drug Administration," emphasizing the need for Korean researchers to take an active leadership role in key clinical trials to secure opportunities to contribute as authors to primary publications. The audience also agreed with her suggestions and provided constructive feedback, e.g., why it is not easy to be the author in the primary publications. After her presentation, she commented that it was a valuable opportunity to gauge the interest of clinical pharmacologists in that subject matter. 

In this conference, Tae Kyu and Yoona were bestowed with the esteemed "Best Presentation Award," marking a significant achievement and recognition for their outstanding presentation skills. Out of around 50 accepted abstracts, only the 7 presentations were deemed worthy of the best presentation title. Tae Kyu and Yoona's work was further celebrated with a cash prize of 100,000 KRW.

After all the programmed sessions were over, attendants eagerly awaited the prize draw. In a moment of drawing for the first gift, Howard emerged as the fortunate recipient. With his jaws on the floor, Howard made his way to claim his prize, a Bluetooth Sony Headphone. The annual conference held by KSCPT was a stage to celebrate the lab's commitment to excellence and an opportunity to showcase our gratitute for the fortune we have experienced.

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.

YeSol had the honor to deliver oral presentation and won the Excellent Research Award at 2022 fall conference hosted by the Korean Society of Medical Informatics(KOSMI). YeSol has presented her work entitled "Effectiveness and safety of sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 inhibitors(SGLT2i) added to mono, dual or triple treatment in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus(T2DM)". She discussed the additive efficacy in glycemic control and the tolerability of SGLT2i in T2DM patients when combined with other antihyperglycemic agents, such as metformin, sulfonylureas, and dipeptidyl peptidase-4 inhibitors using real-world data. Yoona Choi, TaeKyu Chung, and Yoomin Jeon also contributed to this study as co-researchers, with Professor Howard Lee serving as the principle investigator.

The conference was a three-day event (from Nov 23rd, 2022 to Nov 25th, 2022) and was held at The International Convention Center, Jeonbuk National University, Jeonju, Jeonbuk, South Korea. This conference, the host(KOSMI) organized the event around the theme, "The Power and Value of Healthcare Data Linkage". The conference was full of enlightening speeches that reflected the progress made in the field of medical informatics. With a total of 1,039 participants, this conference was held on the largest scale ever among KOSMI conferences. 

Yoomin Jeon and Siun Kim were awarded the Best Oral Presentation Award at the 2021 KSCPT Conference.The Best Oral Presentation Award aims to recognize outstanding scientific papers delivered through oral presentations at the conference. The awards were given to oral presentations of the paper titled "A Randomized, Double-blind, Placebo- and Active-controlled, Escalating Single-dose Study to Evaluate Safety, Tolerability, Pharmacokinetic, and Pharmacodynamic Profiles of Subcutaneous Eflapegrastim in Healthy Japanese and Caucasians" and "An Annotated Corpus and Natural Language Processing Model for Drug Safety Information Extraction from Free-texts Reporting Adverse Events" for Yoomin and Siun, respectively. 

Yoomin presented the results of a phase 1 clinical trial evaluating the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of eflapegrastim following subcutaneous administration to healthy subjects. Eflapegrastim (Rolontis®) is a novel, long-acting Granulocyte-Colony Stimulating Factor (G-CSF) being studied as a treatment for neutropenia that utilizes Hanmi's Labscovery, a proprietary platform technology. 

Siun presented an annotated corpus for extracted Korean adverse events using free-texts from the KAERS (Korean Adverse Event Reporting System) database. To this end, Siun Kim developed deep learning models that automatically extract medication and adverse event information, cooperating with MILAB in Seoul National University.

The 2019 fall conference of The Korean Society of Medical Informatics (KOSMI), organized by Kyungpook National University Hospital (KNUH), was held November 8-9, 2019, at the Global Plaza, Kyunpook National University, Daegu. Prof. Howard Lee, Yoomin Jeon and Junsik Moon participated in the conference.

The conference presented 19 symposia, 6 oral presentation sessions of pre-selected paper submissions, and 3 tutorials in healthcare information, pharmaceutical and big data research which focused on analysis, application and standardization of data based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Sharing research ideas and analysis techniques, the attendees had an in-depth discussion on emerging issues and utilization in the fields of medical informatics.

On the second day, Prof. Lee chaired one of the oral presentation sessions entitled "New Drug and Pharmacovigilance", where he stressed full understanding of the research domain by communicating with experts in each research field. On the other hand, Yoomin presented two posters titled 'A Dimensionality Reduction Model to Increase the Efficiency and Accuracy of Clinical Trial Feasibility Assessment Using Electronic Medical Records' and 'A CDM-based Clinical Trial to Evaluate the Efficacy and Safety of SGLT2 Inhibitors as Add-on Treatment in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus on Metformin, Sulfonylurea and/or DPP-4 Inhibitors'. Yoomin's poster presentations were well received.

Through the conference, the three members of CCADD were delighted to get introduced to the leading academicians and industry experts in the field of medical informatics. Furthermore, Prof. Lee and two CCADD members had a fun discussion that helped them look deeply into their current activities and direction of future research. Their collected insights out of the conference will be further discussed at the upcoming year-end workshop in early December.

Four CCADD members attended the SNU-Hokkaido University joint symposium held in Sapporo, Japan. On the second day of the symposium, professors and students of the Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology of Seoul National University  met members of the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology of Hokkaido University and shared their research ideas, experiences, and results. The participants from the two universities introduced their research progress on a variety of topics, varying from computer-human interaction study to the development of new drug entities using machine learning technology. 

Dr. Soohyun Kim of CCADD gave an oral presentation, where she discussed if therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) of vancomycin is cost-effective in elderly patients. According to Dr. Kim, the cost-effectiveness of vancomycin in this population might not be so cost-effective as was previously anticipated, but could be cost-effective in patients admitted to the intensive care unit. In the following poster session, Dr. Jeong-An Gim presented the results of a pharmacoepigenomic research (Difference in DNA methylation and pharmacokinetics parameters of tacrolimus between two periods of a bioequivalence test with tacrolimus). Dr. Kim tried to provide a basis for tacrolimus pharmacoepigenomics and may provide a clue to the different dose of tacrolimus through his research. Yoomin Jeon, a PhD student at CCADD, introduced a new research project, entitled "A Dimensionality Reduction Model to Increase the Efficiency and Accuracy of Clinical Trial Feasibility Assessment Using Electronic Medical Records." Yoomin’s poster was associated with a new grant CCADD received recently from the National Research Foundation (PI: Prof. Howard Lee). Another PhD student, Siun Kim, presented his research with Dr. Soohuyn Kim about the validity of the equivalence margin in the phase 3 trial with CT-P13, an Infliximab biosimilar. He had an opportunity to discuss the implication and the future plan of the study with researchers of Hokkaido University.

Those attending the symposium from CCADD were able to meet with many young Japanese professionals and researchers in various fields. They  look forward to seeing them again at a joint symposium at Seoul National University next year.

Two CCADD members, Dr. Soohyun Kim (PhD in statistics) and Siun Kim (BS in biology) gave presentations at the 2018 Korean Statistical Society Fall Conference , held on November 2-3 at Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea. Dr. Kim gave an oral presentation of an update of her research on optimal experimental design. Additionally, Siun presented a poster discussing the appropriateness of an equivalence margin used in a clinical trial with CT-P13, an infliximab biosimilar, developed by Celltrion. Dr. Kim’s presentation was well received from her peer statisticians, who have been actively working in the field of experimental statistics in Korea. Interestingly, statisticians at Celltrion dropped by Siun’s poster and asked several questions. On the first day of the conference, Dr. Kim joined a tutorial session on deep learning from a statistician’s point of view.