The Corona Fighters Live invited Prof. Howard Lee to go over the issues pertaining to the recent upswing of COVID-19 cases in Korea, in association with a book that he has just edited and published, entitled 'There is no such thing as K-Quarantine.' YeSol Hong and Jung-Hyun Won also contributed to the book as one of the co-authors.

In this talk, Prof. Lee shared a story as to why he came up with an idea of publishing a book that scientifically and systematically criticizes the flaws and defects of the K-Quranine, which has been praised by the Korean government. Prof. Lee disagreed, "The K-Qurantine is just a political propaganda. No reality is there." 

A full video can be watched at the following YouTube page.   

‘There's no such thing as K-Quarantine', coauthored by Prof. Howard Lee, Jung-Hyun Won, Yesol Hong and 13 others, was published on December 15, 2021. The book focuses on the problems, failures, and indignity of the K-Quarantine that are unlikely to be included in any government-published white paper. Prof. Lee, the editor and lead author of ‘There's no such thing as K-Quarantine', planned this book in a hope that the mistakes and failures associated with the groundless and unscientific K-Quarantine will not be repeated in the future when similar public health crises occur.

The book consists of four parts. Part one vividly describes how society overcome the adversities and difficulties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Jung-Hyun Won, Yesol Hong, and Prof. Lee wrote a chapter in Part one that summarized what had happened during the COVID-19 pandemic (i.e., 2020-2021) in South Korea and other countries (e.g., China, Japan, Israel), and reviewed how each country responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Part two presents the light and shadow of the K-Quarantine through the eyes and perspectives of experts in each field. In one of the chapters in Part two, Prof. Lee criticized the vaccine supply policy of the Korean government during the pandemic, which did not put much effort into securing a sufficient number of vaccine doses as early as possible, risking public health in South Korea.

Part three introduces the readers to the responses from other countries to the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by discussion how different they have been from the K-Quarantine. 

Part 4 summarizes a virtual forum discussion among the co-authors, which Yesol Hong, Jung-Hyun Won, and Prof. Lee organized. Yesol Hong, Jung-Hyun Won, and Prof. Lee prepared questions and agendas in advance, and Prof. Lee led the discussion.

In the preface, Prof. Lee commented, “Our future is not dark. We can do better next time by learning from the failure. I hope this book will may contribute to that transition. I dedicate this book to everyone who lost their precious lives due to COVID-19.”

A column by Prof. Howard Lee, which provided an overview of the issues in drug development in Korea and proposed new strategies to address them, was published at the Op-Ed section of Hankyung, a daily newspaper focusing in economics and finance. In his column, Prof. Lee explained why Korea has not been quite successful in drug development in comparison with its accomplishments in other areas such as semiconductor, automobile, smart phone, and even the content industry these days including K-Pop and K-drama. "There is no drug that has shown commercial viability although >30 new drugs have been developed and approved in Korea since early 2000", Prof. Lee, summarized. "First, and foremost, the business ecosystem has to be revamped", Prof. Lee emphasized, "in order for Korea to show any global leadership in drug development." 

Prof. Lee's column was based on a recent report written by Yoona Choi (lead author), Jung-Hyun Won, YeSol Hong, and himself, which will be published as a stand-alone book early next year. Prof. Lee's column can be accessed by clicking this. 

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.

The book The Age of Biopharmaceuticals, written by Prof. Howard Lee and Siun Kim, Ph.D. a student of CCADD, was selected in the liberal arts section of the Sejong Cultural Book Program this year. The Sejong Cultural Book Program is organized by the Publication Industry Promotion Agency of Korea. This program aims to promote domestic publishing activities and to build a knowledge-based society by selecting outstanding books among those published throughout the year. The book worth 8 million Korean-won will be distributed to public libraries across the country. In 2020, 550 books were selected from a total of 7,184 candidates. The book The Age of Biopharmaceuticals is Coming was selected as an excellent book in the field of technology science. 

Besides, thanks to the interest of many readers, the book went into the second printing. An article reporting the publication appeared in the June issue of Newsletter, GSCST SNU.

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.

The fifth annual Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) Symposium was held on September 15-17, 2019. OHDSI is a multi-stakeholder community on a journey to develop reliable real-world evidence through methodological research and open-source analytics development to bring out the value of observational health data. This year, more than 400 attendees gathered in North Bethesda, Maryland for the symposium. Around 70 participants flew in from Korea, including Prof. Howard Lee and Yoomin Jeon. The symposium had 1 day packed with dynamic and engaging keynote lectures, panel discussions, and a collaborator showcase featuring 7 lightning talks, 10 interactive demonstrations of OHDSI's open-source software, and nearly 80 poster presentations. The other 2 days of the symposium offered more practical hands-on tutorial workshops covering 6 different topics related to real-world data. The tutorial sessions covered the following topics: 1) OMOP Common Data Model & Standardized Vocabularies, 2) Cohort Definition/Phenotyping, 3) Patient-Level Prediction (PLP), 4) Population-Level Estimation (PLE), 5) Data Quality, 6) Extraction, Transformation, and Load process (ETL). Through these hands-on tutorial sessions, Prof. Lee and Yoomin were able to better understand how to leverage the ATLAS, a type of OHDSI's open-source software for designing and executing analytical use cases for clinical characterization, PLP, and PLE within one institution or across the entire OHDSI network. All the tutorial materials can be found here!

As a part of the OHDSI's knowledge-sharing mission, the Book of OHDSI was officially released and distributed for free at the symposium. The book is 470 pages long, consists of twenty chapters in 5 different sections: the OHDSI Community, Uniform Data Representation, Data Analytics, Evidence Quality, and OHDSI Studies. Many OHDSI community members voluntarily chipped-in to summarize all the knowledge developed over its existence into one place, which will assist both newcomers and data science veterans in doing research related to common data model. The book is available on Amazon or online for free. 

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!

On December 20, 2018, CCADD had a day-long workshop at the Yeongeon Campus. The workshop was attended not only by the existing CCADD members, but also by a new CCADD intern and a graduate student in the Interdisciplinary Program of Clinical Pharmacology at Seoul National University. The workshop included 12 presentations, the theme of which covered the history and milestones of CCADD, educational and research activities, talent acquiring strategy, homepage management, student internship experiences, communication, and teambuilding exercise. Furthermore, Professor Kyung-Sang Yu from the SNU College of Medicine and SNU Hospital (Department of Clinical Pharmacology) was invited to a special lecture session. Prof. Yu talked about the importance of e-mail as a means of business communication. He also stressed the appropriate e-mail manners in various business communication contexts.

After the workshop, CCADD members and their family members or invited friends went on a year-end dinner party, which was extended to a sleepover program. All brought a so-called 'useless' gift to the party, which as real fun. The winner of the most useless gift was Tae Chung, who received a used book named 'Sleep 2', written by Bernard Werber, but without having its first book, i.e., 'Sleep1'.

Okay, let's now look at the pictures below and you will easily notice how crazy the party was!

Three CCADD members (Dr. Jeong An Gim, Yoomin Jeon, and Tae Kyu Chung) attended the Pharma AI & IoT 2018 conference, held in London, UK, from July 11 through 12, 2018. Many invited from pharmaceutical companies, software firms, and universities spoke at the conference. The conference provided a comprehensive outlook on the key issues about artificial intelligence (AI), which has been actively adopted at the pharma and healthcare industry. AI-augmented human decision-making was the central theme of the conference. Dr. Margaret McDonald from Pfizer told the audience machine learning or AI would increase efficiencies in regulatory decision-making. She added, "Unsupervised AI may integrate enormous amounts of data and those real world data support regulatory decision-making about drug safety." Likewise, many attendants emphasized the importance of AI in their field of specialization. During the conference, attendants discussed and shared best practices in furthering AI technology development specific to the pharma and healthcare industry through inspiring presentations and network opportunities.

After the conference, the CCADD attendants visited several landmarks in London such as the Greenwich Observatory, Tate Modern museum, and London Eye. Amazing weather and the scenic view of London was a big plus. Visiting London was a great refreshing and learning opportunity.