This summer, CCADD welcomes three interns-Kim Chanmin, Choi Yunjin, and Yoo Kyungwan -for the 2024 Summer Internship Program.

Kyungwan Yoo, a student at Kyung Hee University, earned his Bachelor’s degree in genetic engineering. He worked as an undergraduate researcher at the Kyung Hee University Regenerative Medicine Institute, focusing on creating cell-targeting treatments. Currently, he is interested in integrating biological science with artificial intelligence (AI) technology and applying it to drug development. Kyungwan applied for the 2024 CCADD Summer Internship Program to expand his knowledge of drug development in general, be it clinical trials, and/or utilizing medical big data. He also intends to gain practical experiences in applying programming languages to these domains.

Yunjin Choi has graduated from Stony Brook University with a Bachelor’s degree in mathematics. After graduating, Yunjin worked as a statistical analyst at the Biomedical Research Institute, Korea University Guro Hospital. She has mainly conducted retrospective studies on nephrology and neurology. For example, she published a paper entitled "Fasting glucose variability and risk of dementia in Parkinson's disease: a 9-year longitudinal follow-up study of a nationwide cohort", which examined the impact of fasting glucose variability on the risk of developing dementia in Parkinson's disease patients over a nine-year period. The study found that greater variability in fasting glucose levels was associated with a higher risk of dementia, further suggesting that stabilizing glucose levels might be beneficial for cognitive health in these patients. Besides being the first author of the study, she was also responsible for data analysis and interpretation, ensuring the accuracy and reliability of the study results. She also has the opportunity to learn how to draft and revise the manu and enhance its scientific merit. During this time, Yunjin developed an interest in Real-World Data (RWD), such as electronic medical records (EMR). She intends to pursue her interest while at CCADD.

Chanmin Kim is a Biological Engineering major at Kangwon National University. She became interested in developing new drugs while learning drug delivery systems. She also completed GMP training. After receiving the Excellence Award for designing smart healthcare products at Gachon University's DNA (Data, Network, AI) School Camp , she became interested in improving the efficiency of developing new drugs by applying data science and AI. Her goal is to become a researcher in the development of new drugs using AI. Through her 2024 CCADD summer internship program, she will pursue this goal.

We hope that during their summer internship, they will gain confidence in their field of study, learn how to study independently and explore new knowledge, and devote all their passion to gaining a deep understanding of drug development and regulatory science over the course of these two months.

CCADD attended the 2023 Fall Conference of the Korean Society of Medical Informatics (KoSMI) held at HIP(Healthcare Innovation Park) of Seoul National University Bundang Hospital, South Korea. The conference spanned three days from November 29th to December 1^st, both online and offline. Aligned with the theme "Beyond Data: Actionable Health AI", the conference featured 27 symposiums covering various topics, from artificial intelligence in the healthcare to standardization of medical data and digital health.

The first day was conducted online. Particularly, ”Symposium 6: Development of Predictive Models for Cardiovascular Diseases Using Medical Big Data” was noteworthy, where Prof. Howard Lee served as the session chair and speaker, attracting significant attention from the audience with the presentation on ”Improving the Performance of Machine Learning Models for Predicting Acute Coronary Syndrome in Type 2 Diabetes Patients through Substitution of Propensity Scores for Binary Variables”. Also, throughout the conference, the poster presentation was led by David Seung U Lee.

On the second day, each symposium delved into topics of medical data and artificial intelligence applications to the healthcare domain. Themes included "Strategies for the Activation and Commercialization of AI-Based Drug Development" and "Smart Curation of Medical Data: Approaches for Preparing for the Utilization of Medical AI." This encompassed insights into the industry's latest strategies for drug target exploration. In Symposium 9, Dr. Siun Kim delivered a presentation on ”Addressing the challenges of data scarcity and bias of AI-based drug development”. The discourse extensively covered specific manifestations of data scarcity and proposed strategies for mitigation within drug development.

During the final day, the symposiums provided an opportunity to approach the trends in the utilization and data processing methods of developing LLM. Participants delved into the practical approaches for utilizing Real-World Data (RWD) in regulatory decision-making, replicating Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT), and employing common data models. CCADD members exchanged ideas with fellow researchers studying similar research topics, offering a valuable opportunity to comprehend ongoing research trends. It was an insightful symposium for healthcare information researchers to share and discuss the latest trends in research.

"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. 

CCADD was honored to participate in the joint symposium organized by Seoul National University (SNU) and Kyushu University (KYU) on September 14th. This marks the fourth year of the annual symposium, which was established to foster research collaboration between SNU and KYU.

This year's symposium focused on the theme of “Navigating the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Frontier: A Collaboration.” The discussions were categorized under three sub-themes:

AI for a Sustainable Future: Advancements and Challenges

AI and Human-Centric Innovation: Shaping the Future Together

AI Ethics and Responsible Innovation: Shaping a Trustworthy Future

Under the second sub-theme, David Seung U Lee represented CCADD and presented on “Predicting the efficacy of investigational drugs using real-world data.” This sparked subsequent discussions exploring avenues for further collaboration among the participants.

 In a gathering of brilliant minds from around the world, Professor Howard and his team attended Conference on Health, Inference, and Learning (CHIL) 2023. The three-day event, held from June 22nd to 24th in Cambridge, Massachusetts, provided a platform for cutting-edge research and discussions on the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and healthcare.

Prof. Howard, along with his students Jung Hyun and David, as well as his former student, Siun, were among the select few from South Korea to be invited to this renowned conference. Their attendance was further bolstered by the acceptance of their research paper, titled "Revisiting Machine-Learning Based Drug Repurposing: Drug Indications Are Not a Right Prediction Target," which they presented during the first day's poster session. The team explained the significance and implications of their study, actively engaging with fellow participants and answering questions. More information about the paper can be found here.

The conference encompassed an extensive array of topics, all of which were essential for researchers navigating the rapidly evolving field of AI in healthcare. Attendees were treated to enlightening talks and exciting ideas that spanned innovation, equity, and generalizability in machine learning for health. Discussions included "innovation in machine learning for health," "sharing health data in an age of generative AI: risks, limitations and solutions," "equity implications of machine learning in health: how technology could help or hurt," and "generalizability in machine learning for health: critical for robustness or a distraction from specific validation."

Every moment of the conference proved to be an eye-opening experience. It served as an extraordinary opportunity to broaden their perspectives, push boundaries, and venture beyond their comfort zones.

CCADD welcomes Le Dinh Tuan as a new researcher.

Tuan studied Computer Science at the University of Engineering and Technology, Vietnam National University. Afterward, he spent two years as a research assistant at the Multimedia Communication Signal Processing Lab (MCSP Lab) and received his master's from Artificial Intelligence Convergence Department, Pukyong National University. Tuan's research interests centere around statistical and machine learning (especially deep learning) methods for clinical data analysis.

As a researcher under the supervision of Professor Howard Lee, Tuan will actively partake in the current projects at CCADD pertaining to medical artificial intelligence. At the same time, he will seek to further his knowledge on applying the artificial intelligence technology to the fields of medicine and pharmaceutical sciences.

CCADD is thrilled to welcome Tuan to our team and looks forward to his contributions to our ongoing research efforts.

The 2023 Winter Internship at CCADD has begun. For this year’s internship, CCADD has Jaeho Hyun, who will study and experience the on-going research projects at CCADD.

Jaeho Hyun is a senior in biomedical engineering at Korea University. He studied mechanical system design engineering at Hongik University until the second year in college before he transferred to Korea University starting his junior year. His motivation for transfer was his interest in finding engineering solutions to solve problems in the medical field. Prior to this internship, he studied artificial intelligence (AI) technology in Seoul Information and communication technology (ICT) innovation square in the summer 2022. The program deepened his interest in applying technical knowledge to addressing real world problems pertaining to healthcare and medicine. During the internship at CCADD, he intends to expand his knowledge and explore various applications of real-world data analysis and AI technology in drug development sciences.

As of November 1, researcher Jun-sik Moon moved to PMATCH., a start-up company that develops service and online platforms based on the innovative application of artificial Intelligence.

For the last two years (2019.10~2021.10) Jun-sik has worked hard to apply mathematical principal into the medical field, in particular, to enhance the result for artificial intelligence models from the Small Grant Exploratory Research (SGER) Program to develop a model for assessing clinical trials feasibility. Participating in workshops and projects related with artificial intelligence, he actively helped his fellows when mathematical approach was required.

Jun-sik briefly stated that, through novel programs and varied activities in CCADD, he experienced the significant time when he had an opportunity to broaden his horizons being on good terms with his colleagues. He also did not forget to mention that the treasured memories of CCADD will be in his heart and to thank Prof. Howard Lee and CCADD's members.

CCADD is looking forward to fulfilling his potentiality at PMATCH. beyond the confines of interdisciplinarity and always applauding for his coming carrier.