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.

CCADD congratulates Dr. Kyeong-Ryoon Lee's appointment as Visiting Associate Professor at the Department of Molecular Medicine and Biopharmaceutical Sciences (MMBS). The news of Dr. Kyeong-Ryoon Lee's promotion came out on January 26^th, and his new appointment will take effect on March 1^st, 2021.

Dr. Kyeong-Ryoon Lee received his Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Science at College of Pharmacy, Seoul National University. His research area includes pharmacokinetics, drug metabolism, transporters, and modeling and simulation. Furthermore, Dr. Lee's expertise in artificial intelligence-based modeling, which can be implemented throughout the preclinical and clinical stages of the drug discovery process, has earned him the current position as a research scientist at Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology (KRIBB). 

Dr. Lee's appointment was actually the renewal of his visiting professorship. Dr. Kyeong-Ryoon Lee first joined CCADD on February 2018 as Adjunct Assistant Professor. Since then, Dr. Lee has contributed to CCADD a lot, being a valuable asset for CCADD, not only in research, but in mentoring graduate students.

Once again, CCADD congratulates Dr. Kyeong-Ryoon Lee on his achievement as he is plotting a new path to explore an untapped terrain. CCADD also hopes that Dr. Lee's promotion boosts synergy between CCADD and him. 

CCADD welcomes new interns!

Starting from January 4th, Minjung Kim, Du-Hyeong Lee, and Chaeyun Cho have participated in the 2021 Winter Internship Program at CCADD. David Seung-U Lee, a prospective student of the Department of Molecular Medicine and Biopharmaceutical Sciences, Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology, Seoul National University, has also joined the program as an intern before his semester starts.

Minjung is currently a Hispanic Language and Literature major at Seoul National University and pursues biology as a double major. Her research interest lies in policy analysis of Korea’s integrated clinical research system.

Du-Hyeong is a rising junior at Korea University, focusing on mathematics and statistics. He plans to delve into statistical methods and machine learning for clinical trials and PBPK (physiologically based pharmacokinetics) modeling during his internship.

Chaeyun studies chemical and biological engineering at Korea University, and she joined the team to study clinical drug evaluation and nano drug toxicity.

Last but not least, David has studied English Literature. He is interested in pharmacometrics and drug-drug interaction.

Living up to its motto, CCADD plans to have the new members fully immersed in and orientated to diverse activities including research, studies, and daily routines of a graduate student. As CCADD is gearing toward a new journey, with new members on board, the contribution from the interns and synergy between them and the current members is greatly expected. CCADD also hopes to find gold nuggets in the interns as much as they would do from the program.

Once again, welcome to CCADD!

The 2020 Population Approach Group Korea (PAGK) Annual Meeting was held on November 27 with presenters attending at the WesternLife Hotel, Iksan, Jeolla-do while other participants joining the meeting on-line. The PAGK is a research group affiliated with Korean Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, of which members (currently >180) join from various sectors such as academia (clinical pharmacology, clinical medicine, and pharmacy), hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, CROs, and government agencies.

The plenary speech was delivered by Prof. Yangjin Kim, Professor at the Department of Mathematics at Konkuck University, titled “Mathematical modelling of tumor growth and signaling network, and development of anti-cancer drugs and therapeutic strategies”. The topics in the Young Researchers’ Sessions included physiologically-based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) model for clozapine in Korean patients with schizophrenia, misuse of the Michaelis-Menten for prediction of in vivo clearance for drugs, and microphysiological systems for predicting human pharmacokinetics.

Two PhD students of CCADD, Siun Kim and Tae Kyu Chung, presented their population pharmacokinetic and pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic modeling studies in the trainee session. Prof. Howard Lee also attended the PAGK annual meeting on-site to support and encourage Siun and Tae Kyu to expand their networks. The whole presentations of the two students can be watched at the Youtube channel of CCADD.

Dr. Hyun A Lee attended the SimCYP workshop on model-informed drug development, held on November 12th - 15th, 2019, in Shanghai, China. The SimCYP simulator is a platform for modeling and simulation of physiologically-based pharmacokinetics (PBPK) and pharmacodynamics in virtual humans and laboratory animals. It is one of the most sophisticated solutions for assisting in dose selection and informing product labeling. At CCADD, the SimCYP simulator has been used for physiologically-based pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic modeling and simulation of test articles under preclinical and clinical development.

Th workshop offered an in-dept insight into specific areas of PBPK modeling such as transporter-related absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity (ADMET) and complex drug-drug interactions (DDIs). The workshop courses consisted of lectures and hands-on practical sessions tutored by the SimCYP simulator experts. Dr. Hyun A Lee learned good practices in combining data from both in vitro and clinical studies, while gaining experiences in using such data within physiologically-based pharmacodynamic models to evaluate the DDI liability of drug candidates. She also gained insights into mechanistic approaches to predict the impact of drug transport proteins on ADMET. For those who are interested in the SimCYP workshop's materials, please contact her. 

We cannot believe how quickly time has passed. CCADD students have finished the 15-week 'Clinical Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics in Drug Development' course with no leftovers or dropouts. The students have learned in details how the core principles and concepts of pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics could be applied to speed up clinical drug development and to increase its efficiency, particularly for anti-cancer drugs. In the class, students have not only thoroughly reviewed two textbooks ('Pharmacokinetics in Drug Development, Volume 3 and 4') from chapter to chapter, but also studied other literature, which could go up to tens of published papers. Tae, one of the students who took the course, said, "It was eye-opening to see how what we studied in clinical pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics has been used to real world drug development." He added, "The class was also full of fun. It was an opportunity for the CCADD students to know each other better."

This course was taught in English. That means all the student presentations were given in English!