In response to their book published in 2019, later revised in 2024, entitled 'The Age of Biopharmaceuticals Is Coming', Drs. Howard Lee and Siun Kim were interviewed by Korea Job World early this year, which has been posted on YouTube. This interview was primarily focused on biopharmaceuticals in terms of their differences in comparison with small molecule drugs and as to why they have become important recently. Drs. Lee and Kim also discussed what kinds of disciplines and technologies are critical to successfully develop a biopharmaceutical. A full video clip can be watched by clicking the link below. 

Prof. Howard Lee emphasized the willingness to pay for innovation from the whole societal perspective for South Korea. In a forum organized by Hankyung TV to commemorate the 2023 Korean Biopharmaceutical Award, Prof. Lee discussed what South Korea has to equip itself with to become one of the countries that can not only develop, but market innovative new drugs on a global scale. He listed the following conditions: nationwide control center, training and education, megafunds, advanced drug regulatory science, and willingness to pay for innovation as a society. The following YouTube clip captures the 5th condition.

Prof. Lee stressed the co-vaccination with both COVID19 and Flu since we are entering into a season where flu can become epidemic while the antibody level against COVID19 might not be sufficiently high enough for protecting us from becoming seriously ill once infected. This statement was made in an interview with Arirang TV on October 6, 2023. Prof. Lee continued saying "the pandemic is over, but we are still living with the virus", which leads us to getting some protection against a new sub-variant of COVID19, which is XBB1.5. The two mRNA vaccines by Pfizer or Moderna, respectively, got cleared by the regulatory agencies, Prof. Lee added. A full interview can be watched at the following YouTube link.   

Money Today Broadcasting or MTN interviews Prof. Howard Lee, where he explained why it is indispensable to have a government-wide control tower for new drug development. Prof. Lee stressed the importance of a control tower, preferably set up as an independent, standing government-wide institute that has discretional power over its budget and Human Resources management to maximize its efficiency, which can lead to increased output of new drug development activities in South Korea. His interview can be watched at the following YouTube clip. Additionally, this news article summarizes what Prof. Lee talked in his interview. 

Prof. Howard Lee was invited to Arirang TV New Show in the morning of April 7, 2023, which is World Health Day set by WHO or the World Health Organization. Prof. Lee talked about the implication of the day, coupled with the accomplishments by WHO, particularly for the last couple of years such as the global management of infectious diseases including the COVID-19 pandemic. Full details of Prof. Lee's interview can be watched at the following YouTube link. 

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 Hong won the Excellent Research Award at the 30th Annual Conference of the Korean Society for Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics (KSCPT), December 1-3, 2022, held at Bexco, Busan, South Korea. The title of YeSol's presentation was "One-year follow-up of patients with COVID-19: Analysis of new-onset disease after COVID-19 diagnosis using Real-World Data". She discussed the results of an analysis of the occurrence of disease in patients with COVID-19 over a year using two different real-world data sets. One of her analysis results was a nation-wide study, which was significant in that it included the largest number of study subjects among the studies analyzing the post-COVID-19-condition in Korea. Jung Hyun Won equally contributed to this study with Professor Howard Lee serving as the principal investigator.

Additionally, Siun Kim, Yoona Choi, David Seung U Lee also presented their research through poster exhibition at the conference. 

Full presentations can be watched at the following YouTube links: 

Prof. Howard Lee discussed the issues of new drug development policies and strategies laid out by the Yoon government at the 6th Policy Symposium of the Professional Graduate Schools at Seoul National University, held on September 28, 2022 at the Graduate School of International Studies. Prof. Lee started his presentation by telling why it is important to talk about new drug development policies right at this moment. According to Prof. Lee, the likelihood that South Korea can become a leading country in drug development is the highest in history, but it has to be strengthened and guided by the government to make it a true reality. Prof. Lee pointed out the policies and strategies as proposed were too much focused on biologics, infectious disease, and digital health, urgently requiring some levels of balance. Prof. Lee further emphasized the importance of having a nationwide control tower to reduce redundant investments and to facilitate faster actions currently involving too many government agencies and ministries. Prof. Lee concluded his presentation by saying, "Even though all the recommendations are implemented, Korea cannot become a leading country in new drug development unless the society as a whole is ready to pay a price for innovations."

Prof. Lee's presentation can be watched by clicking the following YouTube link: 

Prof. Howard Lee argued that the current dichotomy between 'orphan drugs' and 'treatments for orphan disease' has severely aggravated the lower reimbursement rate by the National Health Insurance Service for orphan drugs, particularly for children. This argument came out from a forum Prof. Lee was invited to at the National Assembly on July 13, 2022. Prof. Lee continued the reimbursement decision for orphan drugs cannot solely be dependent upon cost-effective analysis because the society has to pay ethical and humanitarian attention to children with orphan diseases and their families, not to mention their pains and frustrations. Prof. Lee's plenary talk was well received by the press too, and his full presentation can be watched by clicking the YouTube link below.  

In an interview with Arirang TV, Prof. Howard Lee stressed the new BA.5 sub-variant of the Omicron Covid-19 could bring a new resurgence to Korea as early as in August. "The BA.5 sub-variant has started dominating the Covid-19 sub-variants in South Korea quite recently, which rose to 25% last week, almost tripled from 10% a week before." Prof. Lee also pointed out the super infectivity of BA.5 by saying "The BA.5 sub-variant is by far the most infectious variant we have seen." Prof. Lee continued, "Scientists call BA.5 immune-evasive, which means vaccination or previous infection doesn't help from getting it." Although BA.5 may pose a bigger health problem to the society as a whole, Prof. Lee did not agree to go back to strict measure in the past resurgences. The full video interview of Prof. Lee can be watched at the following YouTube clip. 

Prof. Howard Lee was invited to the 2022 Spring Conference of the Korean Society of Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Regulatory Sciences, June 24, 2022, where he proposed the most critical and urgent action items to advance regulatory science in Korea. Prof. Lee emphasized that four areas of uncertainty needed to be clarified first before the level of regulatory science in Korea could be improved. According to Prof. Lee, there are four uncertainties in the regulatory science community in Korea, i.e., the focus, driver(s), human resource development, and making regulatory science academically vigorous and independent. Prof. Lee's talk was featured in an article by KPA News. 

Prof. Lee's full  presentation can be watched at the following YouTube link.