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.

Prof. Lee and David Seung U Lee met with Prof. M. Madan Babu, PhD, FRS, FMedSci, from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis, TN, USA, July 17, 2023 in the Grand Hyatt Incheon. Prof. Babu is currently the Endowed Chair in Biomedical Data Science and Director of the Center of Excellence for Data Driven Discovery, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. He will soon serve as a Senior Vice President and Chief Data Scientist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Prof. Babu is an acclaimed researcher and scientist in various fields including GPCR signaling, regulation and pharmacology, gene , gene regulation, computational biology, structural bioinformatics, and drug discovery. He published many research articles in high-impact journals such as Nature, Science, and Cell. He is also Chief Editor for Molecular Systems Biology journal. 

It has turned out that Prof. Babu had followed the work from CCADD and is interested to know more about what is currently happening in those research areas. In this regard, the main purpose of Prof. Babu's visit this time was to establish professional relationships and set up international scientific bridges with St. Jude to enrich biomedical data science collaborations. Prof. Lee and David detailed the big data science and AI in drug development and optimal usage projects by CCADD, in which Prof. Babu showed great interest. Prof. Babu asked Prof. Lee for additional information and s for those research projects, which David will soon follow up. 

Out of a 3-hour lunch meeting with Prof. Babu, many collaboration opportunities and projects were discussed and proposed, one of which was an exchange program between the two institutions. Co-publication was also talked about, and Prof. Babu asked if CCADD could write a perspective paper regarding drug repurposing using AI for the Molecular Systems Biology journal. Prof. Lee and David hope to see more details soon and will keep CCADD informed. 

Prof. Howard Lee and some CCADD members including Yoomin Jeon, Yoona Choi, and YeSol Hong visited AstraZeneca Korea (AZK) on December 3, 2020. AZ is a research-intensive pharmaceutical company based in the UK and has recently developed a vaccine against COVID-19. AZK invited Prof. Lee to a big data seminar series, and he talked about the role of medical big data including real world data and artificial intelligence (AI) in drug discovery and development. Prof. Lee also discussed how pharmaceutical companies could prepare themselves for the active and efficient adoption of big data and AI technologies for the day-to-day drug development activities. 

Yoona and YeSol are actually a former employee to AZK, in the departments of medical affairs and marketing, respectively. Thus, this visit was a kind of homecoming, and everyone welcomed them.The visit was also a great opportunity for CCADD to introduce its research fields and capabilities to pharmaceutical companies. This opportunity will enable CCADD for exploring many collaboration projects with those who are involved in actual drug development, which will certainly fill a gap for CCADD such that academic research is well aligned with the reality.     

Yes, Boca Raton is in Florida, the average temperature of which in December is 24 degrees Celsius! Several CCADD members including Prof. Lee, Yoomin Jeon, Taekyu Chung, Siun Kim and Junsik Moon attended the Eighteenth International Conference on Machine Learning(ML) and Applications (ICMLA) held at Marriott Hotel, Boca Raton, Florida, USA on December 16-19, 2019. Like the subtropical climate of the city, the conference was also full of passionate researchers and practitioners presenting their latest achievements and innovations in the area of ML.

Started by three excellent keynote lectures, each day in the morning except for the first day, concerning the robustness/efficiency of data management, which was also aimed to attract researchers and application developers from a wide range of ML related areas, the conference covered not only an urgent need for machine learning to address new challenges from the recent emergence of Big Data processing but also theoretical research/application in ML.

Prof. Howard Lee and CCADD’s members were able to garner meaningful insight in each section describing machine learning techniques applied to real-world problems and interdisciplinary research involving machine learning in various fields such as medicine, biology, industry, security, and education. This gained insight was partly assisted by ‘Artificial Intelligence for New Drug Development and Clinical Application’, a course organized by Prof. Lee and taught by CCADD members last semester. Joining the conference, Prof. Lee seemed to be reinforced by the insight that could refine and strengthen the scope, direction, and emphasis of the research for CCADD.

After the conference, CCADD’s members visited Key West, the continental southernmost point, which is the starting point of U.S. Route 1, the longest north-south road in the United States. Not only enjoying classy seafood cuisine and stunning scenery while on road, but they had a chance to share interesting ideas as to the new research direction of CCADD.

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.

On April 24, 2019, Prof. Howard Lee and 5 CCADD members presented a seminar at the Laboratory of Genome Epidemiology and Health Big Data (G-Epi), Graduate School of Public Health at Seoul National University. It was a return visit in response to G-Epi's one 10 months ago. G-Epi (PI: Joohon Sung) focuses on the data analysis of genetic, demographic, physiological, and environmental factors of complex diseases. G-Epi uses epidemiological, statistical, and bioinformatics approaches to analyze large-scale omics data.

In the seminar, Prof. Howard Lee introduced G-Epi to one of the CCADD's current Artificial Intelligence (AI) research projects, entitled 'A dimensionality reduction model to increase the efficacy and accuracy of clinical trial feasibility assessment using electronic medical records.' Hyun A Lee and Dr. Jeong-An Kim also spoke about their research projects, a PBPK modeling analysis of an acid-reducing agent under clinical development and a pharmacoepigenomic analysis of Tacrolimus, respectively. The seminar was a great opportunity for both labs to share their research experiences, ideas, and future perspectives. G-Epi and CCADD are looking forward to closely working together in various research projects in the future.