Prof. Howard Lee has officially expressed strong disapproval of the reimbursement for 'cheobyak' or the mixture of herbal (or natural products-derived) drugs. In a roundtable provoked by the impending reimbursement decision of cheobyak by the Korea National Health Insurance Service against the objections by medical and scientific societies altogether, Prof. Lee raised intense disagreement with the government policy to support reimbursement of cheobyak. Prof. Lee argued that cheobyak has never been shown to be efficacious and safe through scientific assessments by the regulatory agency such as the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety in Korea, not to mention its uncertain quality as a medicine. He continued, discussing "The cost-effectiveness of any cheobyak has never been validly studied and confirmed, which is the minimal requirement for any drug approved and listed for health insurance reimbursement in Korea." 

A summary of Prof. Lee's presentation at the roundtable can be found in many newspaper articles, one example of which is here. Additionally, his full presentation has been uploaded to YouTube as seen below:        

In the afternoon of 22nd May, the members of CCADD went on a picnic to the Gwanggyo Lake Park. After completing a regular schedule in the morning such as lab meeting and book reading, all members left the lab with excitement.

To ensure social distancing in apprehension of the COVID-19 pandemic, CCADD opted for an outdoor picnic as team building rather than indoor activities such as bowling or movie-watching, and it turned much more fun! Upon arrival, they instantaneously regretted not to have more opportunities for the past 4 years or so to come to such a beautiful place just nearby with eye candy scenery and great decks for walking. The weather was also perfect, not too cool, not too warm.

After enjoying a chat while having To-Pi-Chi (Toppoki, Pizza and Chicken), a favorite food combination for all the CCADD members, they played a couple of fun games from Korean TV shows – which are ‘Shouting in the Silence’ and ‘Sketch Quiz’. They laughed a lot seeing funny moments during the games; it was truly a time for healing, refreshing, and team building!

Wrapping up the picnic in time just before it rained, they decided to come to the Gwanggyo Lake Park again soon and often.

CCADD has successfully assembled an interdisciplinary research team at SNU, interested in the application of AI to the development and optimal use of drugs. Recently, the team has received a small, but important, intramural grant to coordinate a series of forums to stimulate, develop, and nurture new, innovative research ideas in the field, entitled “Artificial intelligence for drug development and its optimal use (PI: Prof. Howard Lee)”. Prof. Young Kee Shin, Prof. Eugene C. Yi, Prof. Park Young Joo (from MMBS), Prof. Bongki Moon (from the Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering), Prof. Jung Mi Oh (from the College of Pharmacy), Prof. Jinwook Choi (from the Interdisciplinary Program in Bioengineering), and graduate students in the research teams will meet regularly starting early June 2020 through mid August.

The intramural grant of 3 million Korean won or $2,500 was awarded by the SNU AI Committee. Through the forum, recent progresses in applying AI and machine learning techniques to drug development and its optimal use will be reviewed. Furthermore, the forum will actively seek novel research topics in the fields, which CCADD hopes to end up leading to new grant applications.

In the upheaval caused by COVID-19 or the coronavirus, Dr. Lee stressed the importance of drug repositioning technology to develop a new treatment. In an interview with a KBS news program, Dr. Lee introduced the listener to the core concept of drug repositioning and explained why it could be life-saving in the midst of the chaotic COVID-19 pandemic. "Instead of finding new molecules or compounds from scratch, drug repositioning looks for test articles under active development or those fully developed for other indications, or even for those abandoned due to various reasons", Dr. Lee commented. 

So far, no treatment has been shown to be effective in treating patients with COVID-19. But, several compounds have been suggested as a potential treatment such as remdesivir by Gilead Sciences, for which ~80 drug repositioning clinical trials have already been commenced worldwide. The full video clip of Dr. Lee's interview can be found down below.

The 2019 Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) Korea International Symposium was held on December 12-14 at Konjiam Resort, Korea. The symposium gathered nearly 400 participants from nine different countries, clearly showing a growing interest in the OHDSI community. The main session on the second day was followed by full-day tutorial workshops on the first day. The main session began with a warm welcome by Prof. Rong Min Baek, the Chairman of the Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Seoul National University College of Medicine, followed by an overview of the Korean OHDSI journey by Prof. Rae Woong Park, the Director and Professor at the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Ajou University School of Medicine. Other topics in the main session included an introduction to the European Health Data & Evidence Network (EHDEN) project, the OHDSI Initiative, and the FeederNet platform. The key message from all these presentations was on generating reproducible and reliable evidence from the existing clinical data standardized by the OHDSI common data model (CDM).  

Among three parallel sessions, 'Clinical trials in OHDSI' session was newly introduced this year. This parallel session purely focused on clinical trials, which consisted of the following three invited talks: 'Introduction to clinical trials', 'Smart User-friendly CDM-based Clinical trial dEsign Support System, SUCCESS', and 'OHDSI use case: clinical trial feasibility'. Charles Joochul Lee, a general manager of Selvas AI Inc., and Ms. Yoomin Jeon were invited to give a talk on the SUCCESS project, a CDM-based simulation system to assist clinical trial feasibility and designing clinical trials. Mr. Lee introduced the principles behind why and how SUCCESS was developed. Mr. Lee then gave a demonstration of SUCCESS system. To provide a better understanding of how a CDM-based simulation system can be implemented, Yoomin spoke about a CDM-based virtual clinical trial project (from the 2nd Korea Clinical Datathon) as a case study. Using the Ajou University Hospital CDM real-world data, her team has successfully shown that patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus, who are treated with metformin, sulfonylurea, and/or dipeptidylpeptidase-4 inhibitors (DPP4i), can benefit from add-on sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 inhibitors (SGLT2i) treatment in terms of both additional efficacy and comparable safety. Based on the analysis using this CDM data, adding an SGLT2i has shown an additional efficacy and comparable safety profiles to those identified with SGLT2i in actual clinical trials. Yoomin concluded her talk by stating that exploring the efficacy and safety of the proposed treatment using simulation experiments can help design an optimized clinical trial, which may increase the chance of success in the clinical trials. The talks by Mr. Lee and Yoomin were well received, and an active and interesting Q & A session was followed.

On December 4-5, 2019, CCADD and Selvas AI Inc held their first-ever joint workshop on Common Data Model (CDM)-based simulation system project, which were co-awarded by the South Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy (MOTIE) (a link to previous news). The project is coined as SUCCESS or 'Smart User-friendly CDM-based Clinical trial dEsign Support System. The main objective of this workshop was to share what Selvas and CCADD have accomplished during the first-year of this on-going project and to plan for the following year. 

On the first day, a hands-on tutorial on ATLAS was led by two invited outside speakers, Mr. Jaehyung Cho and Mr. Chungsoo Kim from Ajou University. ATLAS is a web-based open-source platform developed by the OHDSI community aiming to perform complex patient/population studies on OMOP CDM databases and visualize the results. This hands-on tutorial focused on presenting the fundamental principles and implementations on ATLAS, covering CDM vocabulary tables, standard vocabulary browsing, concept sets, cohort definition/phenotyping, and population-level estimation. The tutorial was well organized and interactive, which helped all the participants better understand the implications and possibilities of ATLAS for SUCCESS.

On the second day, a year-end performance review for SUCCESS was presented by Mr. Charles Joochul Lee, a general manager of Selvas AI Inc., who has led the project in collaboration with Prof. Howard Lee. Additionally, a domain expert in the field of clinical trials, Ms. Jumi Han, a team leader, Daewoong Pharmaceuticals, was invited. Ms. Han gave the team an instantaneous feedback on the aspects of practical implementation of SUCCESS. This session of the workshop was a unique opportunity to identify ways to improve the performance of SUCCESS.