Prof. Howard Lee has been recently awarded Mid-Career Research Grant from the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Korea. The total funding amounted to approximately 300 million Korean won spread across three years of research (from year 2023 to 2025). Prof. Howard Lee and his team at CCADD will focus on improving the generalization performance of natural language processing models in extracting drug safety information from multi-institutional clinical notes. More specifically, the team will analyze the semi-structured clinical notes written in diverse clinical settings and investigate the feasibility of using them, along with multi-task generative models, as a way to improve model generalizability. Furthermore, the study will explore the applicability of state-of-the-art generative language models and their ability to augment text data to accomplishing the study objective.

CCADD is breaking the ground for biomedical natural language processing or NLP!

On January 22^nd, 2021, CCADD was nominated by the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety to develop an NLP model that extracts core clinical information from unstructured data in the Korea Adverse Event Reporting System (KAERS). The total research fund amounts to two hundred million Korean won or a hundred and eighty thousand U.S. dollars. The project will be performed in collaboration with the Machine Intelligence lab in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Seoul National University (Prof. Gyo-Min Jung). 

For starters, CCADD will build a manually annotated dataset, which is indispensable to train and refine any machine learning algorithm including NLP. Next, CCADD plans to build the KAERS-BERT model, an NLP model specifically tuned to handle adverse drug events. The KAERS-BERT model will be pre-trained on KAERS text data, which then will be deployed to extract medical information from free texts, such as hand-written records of adverse events. Once complete, the KAERS-BERT model is expected to address many of the language ambiguities caused by the mixed use of English and Korean in medical domains already peppered with technical and medical jargons. The KAERS-BERT model will significantly improve the performance and the outcome of NLP tasks when extracting information from clinical notes written in English and Korean. 

Prof. Howard Lee, the PI of the grant, congratulated the team, saying "The grant awarding is timely and important since it will help CCADD enter a new area of biomedical NLP." At the conclusion of this project, CCADD will once again have secured its place as the leading lab in the field of convergence science between medicine, drug development, and machine learning including NLP. "This certainly provides CCADD with a momentum to transform into a frontrunner in the field", Prof. Lee added.

CCADD has been recently awarded a new research grant from the South Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy (MOTIE) to develop a clinical trial simulation system. The kick-off meeting was held on June 3, 2019. The total research funding was 1.4 billion Korean Won, which is equivalent to $1,200,000. The three-year project will be led by Mr. Charles Joochul Lee, a general manager of Selvas AI Inc, and CCADD (PI: Prof. Howard Lee) will develop a CDM-based simulation system, by which clinical trial feasibility is performed. In the process, CCADD will also design a user-friendly interface for the system. 

The title of the proposed research plan is the 'Smart User-friendly CDM-based Clinical trial dEsign Support System, or SUCCESS', an interesting term coined by Prof. Howard Lee, which symbolizes the desire for success in clinical drug development.  

Ms. Jung Chun Gwon has joined CCADD on August 16th as an administrative assistant and accountant. In this capacity, Jung Chun will be assisting Profs. Howard Lee and Hyung-Jun Im of the TMT Laboratory, and will be also in charge of accounting in the research grants. Jung Chun studied economics at Sookmyung Women’s University, where she received a BA degree. 

Prior to joining CCADD, Jung Chun worked in the Korea Institute of Finance (KIF) as a secretary and research associate for eight years, where she was responsible for writing up research reports and proposals. Prof. Lee welcomed Jung Chun , saying "she will be a great addition to CCADD, helping us with various administrative tasks and activities, which have been often unattended". Please join us in welcoming Jung Chun to CCADD!