Prof. Howard Lee emphasized the willingness to pay for innovation from the whole societal perspective for South Korea. In a forum organized by Hankyung TV to commemorate the 2023 Korean Biopharmaceutical Award, Prof. Lee discussed what South Korea has to equip itself with to become one of the countries that can not only develop, but market innovative new drugs on a global scale. He listed the following conditions: nationwide control center, training and education, megafunds, advanced drug regulatory science, and willingness to pay for innovation as a society. The following YouTube clip captures the 5th condition.

"Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a bright future in the area of drug discovery and development", Prof. Howard Lee agreed. But, he went on saying, "The focus has been drug discovery, particularly de novo search of new 'drug-like' molecules, which came up with a mix of some successes and mostly failures." To Prof. Lee, there is a more important area where AI applications have not been tried much, and that is clinical development, more expensive, lengthy, and riskier. These statements were made at a K-Healthcare Business Forum, co-sponsored by Young Doctors, KBR, and KHIDI, on October 13, 2023.

In a speech entitled "AI-based drug development: Hype or Reality?", Prof. Lee explained why the application of AI technologies has been mostly limited to early stage or drug discovery, and how this can be expanded to the later phase of drug development such as preclinical toxicity prediction and more robust and efficient design and conduct of clinical trials. The details of Prof. Lee's talk can be found in this news paper article. 

Prof. Lee stressed the co-vaccination with both COVID19 and Flu since we are entering into a season where flu can become epidemic while the antibody level against COVID19 might not be sufficiently high enough for protecting us from becoming seriously ill once infected. This statement was made in an interview with Arirang TV on October 6, 2023. Prof. Lee continued saying "the pandemic is over, but we are still living with the virus", which leads us to getting some protection against a new sub-variant of COVID19, which is XBB1.5. The two mRNA vaccines by Pfizer or Moderna, respectively, got cleared by the regulatory agencies, Prof. Lee added. A full interview can be watched at the following YouTube link.   

"In South Korea, not all orphan drugs are reimbursed by the National Health Insurance Service primarily because they are different from drugs to treat rare diseases from the legal perspective", talked Prof. Lee at the 7th K-Life Bio Forum, held on September 26, 2023 at the National Assembly, co-sponsored by the Korean Pharmaceutical Association and Congressman Min-Suk Kim, the Democratic Party of Korea. Prof. Lee continued saying "This is why so many orphan drugs cannot be accessed by those who need them desperately although the orphan drugs have been approved the the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, the regulatory authority in South Kore." Furthermore, Prof. Lee pointed out the drawbacks of reimbursement decision made by the HIRA solely dependent upon the evaluation of cost-effectiveness based on incremental cost-effectiveness ratio or ICER. "We need other funding mechanisms than the national health insurance for patients with rare diseases to get access faster to the orphan drugs they cannot live a quality life without", Prof. Lee stressed. Several news paper articles reported what Prof. Lee presented at the Forum, one of which can be found here. 

CCADD was honored to participate in the joint symposium organized by Seoul National University (SNU) and Kyushu University (KYU) on September 14th. This marks the fourth year of the annual symposium, which was established to foster research collaboration between SNU and KYU.

This year's symposium focused on the theme of “Navigating the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Frontier: A Collaboration.” The discussions were categorized under three sub-themes:

AI for a Sustainable Future: Advancements and Challenges

AI and Human-Centric Innovation: Shaping the Future Together

AI Ethics and Responsible Innovation: Shaping a Trustworthy Future

Under the second sub-theme, David Seung U Lee represented CCADD and presented on “Predicting the efficacy of investigational drugs using real-world data.” This sparked subsequent discussions exploring avenues for further collaboration among the participants.

Money Today Broadcasting or MTN interviews Prof. Howard Lee, where he explained why it is indispensable to have a government-wide control tower for new drug development. Prof. Lee stressed the importance of a control tower, preferably set up as an independent, standing government-wide institute that has discretional power over its budget and Human Resources management to maximize its efficiency, which can lead to increased output of new drug development activities in South Korea. His interview can be watched at the following YouTube clip. Additionally, this news article summarizes what Prof. Lee talked in his interview.