CCADD attended this year's highly anticipated biennial conference hosted by the Korean Society of Medical Informatics (KOSMI). Held at Keimyung University Dongsan Hospital in Daegu, South Korea, the conference spanned two insightful days, supplemented by a three-hour tutorial program.

Under the theme of "Revolution and Innovation in Smart Healthcare," the event delved into an array of captivating topics. Attendees had the privilege of exploring groundbreaking subjects, including the "Application of Large Language Models in Healthcare" and the "Utilization of ChatGPT and Natural Language Processing Models in Medical Research."

Throughout the conference, CCADD seized every moment to absorb valuable lessons. The gathering also served as a catalyst for expanding perspectives and engaging in constructive discussions at this pivotal juncture in the realm of medicine and healthcare. With powerful technologies like ChatGPT emerging, the field is undoubtedly experiencing a wind of change, and KOSMI's conference provided a unique platform to address the challenges and opportunities presented by these advancements.

On February 24^th, CCADD celebrated the graduation of two of its members, Siun Kim and David Seung U Lee. Siun, an applied bioengineering major, started his joint Masters and PhD program in 2018 and studied under Prof. Howard Lee’s guidance. He received his PhD in Medicine for his thesis on applying natural language processing technology to drug safety monitoring. David, a molecular medicine and biopharmaceutical sciences (MMBS) major, joined CCADD in 2021 and has since studied under Prof. Howard Lee. He received his MSc in Medicine for his study on clinical characteristics associated with dulaglutide treatment adherence.

Siun, for all his contribution to CCADD, embarked on a new career as a postdoctoral researcher at Seoul National University Hospital Biomedical Research Institute. There, he will focus on developing AI models for the prediction of hypoglycemia during dialysis and the analysis of nursing notes of kidney surgery recipients. David will continue to study under Prof. Howard as a PhD student starting 2023.

We congratulate on their accomplishment and convey our best wishes at their new start.

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.

Convergence Newsletter, a yearly news article published by Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology, Seoul National University, highlighted two stories from CCADD.

First, the afterword of Chaeyun (then chemical and biological engineering major at Korea University) and her reflection on the 2021 Winter Internship at CCADD received a spotlight dividend in the 2020 Winter Joint Research Program corner.

Looking back on what she did, she is glad that she jumped at the opportunity. For her, being part of the project, “Predicting drug-drug interaction based on machine learning,” was a storehouse of lessons. She was able to gain hands-on experience in the area she had been passionate about, and she could gain a concrete understanding of machine learning technology and its applications to pharmacology. Also, she fondly recalls how she could pick others’ brains while trying to keep up with the rigorous “Book Reading” schedule, during which the CCADD members, interns included, finished off three textbooks on Natural Language Processing and Python. As her closing remark, she admitted the internship experience was a gratifying step toward living her dream as an aspiring future pharmacologist, and she thanked all the lab members, and especially Prof. Lee, for the opportunity and all the supports they’d shown to her.

Next in the Issue Focus section, which showcased the wonderful accomplishments of the professors at Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology, Seoul National University, Prof. Lee made the headlines. The highlight covers the news that 세종도서 has named the book Siun Kim (a PhD student at CCADD) and Prof. Lee co-wrote, “바이오 의약품 시대가 온다,” as one of the greatest works in 2020. The book was touted for how it effortlessly explicates the complicated drug-approval process. Also, by being comprehensive in its cover of the knowledge (e.g., basic biology) and the domain-specific one (e.g., monoclonal antibodies, gene therapies, and the difference between generics and biologics), the book gently nudges readers toward thinking like biologists and engages them in the collective effort to raise awareness of biologics. This book also has its merit in being accessible to the readers outside the scientific domain, and it’s inviting readers from diverse swaths of to the question of how we will make the great leap forward to the future of biologics.

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.