Lee SW, Choi D, Heo M, Shin EC, Park SH, Kim SJ, Oh YK, Lee BH, Yang SH, Sung YC, Lee H. hIL-7-hyFc, a long-acting IL-7, increased absolute lymphocyte count in healthy subjects. Clin. Transl. Sci. 2020 Apr 27.; doi:10.1111/cts. 12800

Six undergraduate students (Sung Jong Kim, Hwe Won Kim, Jinyeong Yang, Song Yeon Oh, Chae Jeong Lee, and Yura Hwang) joined CCADD for the 2020 Winter Smart Internship, and they will spend the next 8 weeks in exploring the research environment at CCADD while having opportunities to participate in the ongoing research projects.

Sung Jong Kim is a fourth-year undergraduate student at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, double majoring in Molecular Biotechnology and English-Korean Interpretation and Translation Studies. Studying biology and biotechnologies, Sung Jong has developed a broad interest in pharmacology and computer science. He is looking forward to learning NONMEM, an analysis program for pharmacokinetic pharmacodynamic (PKPD) modeling, during his internship program.

Song Yeon Oh is also a senior student at HanKuk University of Foreign Studies, and has studied Environmental Science. Song Yeon's research interests include applying artificial intelligence (AI) technologies into the pharmaceutical area to make drug development processes more efficient. During the internship program, she wants to learn methods to analyze medical data using computer language, such as Python and R, by participating in the CCADD's current projects.

Chae Jeong Lee is a second-year student at HanKuk University of Foreign Studies, majoring in Biomedical Engineering and Computer and Electronic Systems Engineering. Being familiar with C and Python, Chae Jeong wants to participate in CCADD's current AI projects such as those awarded by National Institute of Food Drug Safety Evaluation (NIFDS) and South Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy (MOTIE). Through this winter internship program, she is looking forward to learning R to improve her coding skills.

Hwe Won Kim is a fourth-year undergraduate student at Konkuk University. She studies Converged Material Engineering and Environmental Engineering. Prior to the internship program at CCADD, Hwe Won worked as an intern researcher in the Department of Stem cell and Regenerative Biotechnology laboratory and has become interested in pharmacology and AI technologies. Through the internship program, she is looking forward to learning the basics of clinical pharmacology and AI algorithms applicable to pharmaceutical area.

Jinyeong Yang is a second-year student at College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Seoul National University. Jinyeong was involved in research project project to develop a liquid bandage for patients with atopy to prevent potential secondary infections. Through her past experience, Jinyeong has become more interested in PK, PD, and development process of a drug. She is looking forward to learning the pharmacology and drug development process, as well as experiencing the research environment in graduate school. 

Yura Hwang is a senior student at Pusan University with a major in Molecular Biology and a minor in Chemistry. Previously, Yura worked in PRG S&T, a pharmaceutical start-up, where she has developed an interest in theoretical and computational methods to describe variability in PK. She is looking forward to learning NONMEM during her internship program.

This 2020 winter internship program will provide participants with opportunities to learn clinical pharmacology, machine learning algorithms, and computer languages for data analysis as shown below. CCADD wholeheartedly welcomes the 6 intern students, and hopes them to enjoy, learn, and experience as much as they want and can during the rest of their internship programs.

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. 

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 AI Summit New York 2019 has been promoted as "the only event globally to focus exclusively on the impact of AI in business", and that's not an exaggeration. Attracting >5,000 attendees from all of the world, of whom Prof. Howard Lee is one, the AI summit New York 2019 was featured by three exclusive tracks, i.e., the Deliver Stage for the visionary high-ranked leaders and chief officers, the Implement Stage for the senior strategists, the Develop Stage for the technical leaders. Additionally, there were four summits, each focusing on a specific business field or sector, i.e., finance, retail, healthcare and pharma, and sales and marketing. Lastly, but not the least, AI training academy, mostly introductory though, was provided. Truly, it was enlightening to listen and watch how AI has been implemented to leverage its core technology to maximize the efficiency and productivity of day-to-day business practices in many business areas from strategy planning to decision makings to operations to outcome tracking. 

Of the many talks and show case presentations, Prof. Lee was particularly hooked up with a high-level, inspiring, and thought-provoking presentation by Mr. Jeff McMillan, Chief Analytics and Data Officer at Morgan Stanley. What made his talk unique from many others was that Mr. McMillan helped the audience realize AI is not an objective, but business outcome is. According to him, too many AI has simply failed to deliver what it promised to provide either because it didn't actually do what it said it did, it worked but added no value, it added value but was too complicated to use, it was to expensive to implement, or it lacked the necessary data. Certainly, Mr. McMillan's talk was a wake-up call to many AI-porn geeks. So influenced by Mr. McMillan's talk, Prof. Lee has decided to deliver his own version of Mr. McMillan's presentation after he returns. 

New York City in December was cold and wet as usual, mixed with businessmen, tourists, and passers-by with a motionless face. Prof. Lee has departed for the next destination, Boca Raton, Florida to attend another meeting there. That's is why he had to bring a much bigger suitcase than usual for this trip that suits two different temperature zones.