Prof. Howard Lee was invited to Arirang TV New Show in the morning of April 7, 2023, which is World Health Day set by WHO or the World Health Organization. Prof. Lee talked about the implication of the day, coupled with the accomplishments by WHO, particularly for the last couple of years such as the global management of infectious diseases including the COVID-19 pandemic. Full details of Prof. Lee's interview can be watched at the following YouTube link. 

Prof. Howard Lee has been recently awarded Mid-Career Research Grant from the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Korea. The total funding amounted to approximately 300 million Korean won spread across three years of research (from year 2023 to 2025). Prof. Howard Lee and his team at CCADD will focus on improving the generalization performance of natural language processing models in extracting drug safety information from multi-institutional clinical notes. More specifically, the team will analyze the semi-structured clinical notes written in diverse clinical settings and investigate the feasibility of using them, along with multi-task generative models, as a way to improve model generalizability. Furthermore, the study will explore the applicability of state-of-the-art generative language models and their ability to augment text data to accomplishing the study objective.

On February 24th, David was invited to attend the 77^th commencement ceremony of Seoul National University (SNU). The event celebrated a total of 4,637 students (2,154 undergraduates, 1,708 master’s students, and 775 PhD students) who received their degrees. That day, David had the honor to be awarded his degree by President Ryu Hong Lim, representing 41 graduating master’s students of the Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology, Seoul National University.

On February 24^th, CCADD celebrated the graduation of two of its members, Siun Kim and David Seung U Lee. Siun, an applied bioengineering major, started his joint Masters and PhD program in 2018 and studied under Prof. Howard Lee’s guidance. He received his PhD in Medicine for his thesis on applying natural language processing technology to drug safety monitoring. David, a molecular medicine and biopharmaceutical sciences (MMBS) major, joined CCADD in 2021 and has since studied under Prof. Howard Lee. He received his MSc in Medicine for his study on clinical characteristics associated with dulaglutide treatment adherence.

Siun, for all his contribution to CCADD, embarked on a new career as a postdoctoral researcher at Seoul National University Hospital Biomedical Research Institute. There, he will focus on developing AI models for the prediction of hypoglycemia during dialysis and the analysis of nursing notes of kidney surgery recipients. David will continue to study under Prof. Howard as a PhD student starting 2023.

We congratulate on their accomplishment and convey our best wishes at their new start.

Prof. Howard Lee was invited to an online forum organized by the Federation Peruana de Enfermedades Raras or FEPER on February 28, 2023. In his talk, Prof. Lee summarized the current drug lags for orphan drugs in South Korea, followed by the challenges and issues for delayed and less-satisfactory reimbursement of orphan drugs. Prof. Lee concluded his talk by proposing new policies and systems to increase the accessibility of orphan drugs in South Korea. They included:1) reduce drug lags, particularly approval lags by the regulatory agency, by continuously innovating and harmonizing regulation, 2) ensure orphan drugs be reimbursed as soon as possible, and 3) fill the gap between the legal status of orphan drugs and the reimbursement policy for drugs to treat rare diseases.

The 2023 Winter Internship at CCADD has begun. For this year’s internship, CCADD has Jaeho Hyun, who will study and experience the on-going research projects at CCADD.

Jaeho Hyun is a senior in biomedical engineering at Korea University. He studied mechanical system design engineering at Hongik University until the second year in college before he transferred to Korea University starting his junior year. His motivation for transfer was his interest in finding engineering solutions to solve problems in the medical field. Prior to this internship, he studied artificial intelligence (AI) technology in Seoul Information and communication technology (ICT) innovation square in the summer 2022. The program deepened his interest in applying technical knowledge to addressing real world problems pertaining to healthcare and medicine. During the internship at CCADD, he intends to expand his knowledge and explore various applications of real-world data analysis and AI technology in drug development sciences.

Jung-Hyun Won was invited to the KOREA AI SUMMIT 2022 (“AI for Good”), where she presented the collaboration research project between CCADD (Siun Kim, Jung-Hyun Won, David Seung U Lee, and Prof. Howard) and Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) entitled “Revisiting and Reformulating Machine Learning-based Drug Repositioning”, orally and as a poster. The Korea AI Summit 2022, organized by AI Innovation Hub, Microsoft Research, IITP, and Korea University AI Research Institute, aimed to provide a platform for academic leaders from the prominent universities and institutes to share and explore the latest developments and technological trends in AI research.

Jung-Hyun Won stated that the team (i.e., CCADD and MSRA) has pointed out problems in the current task formulation of machine learning-based drug repositioning studies. According to Jung-Hyun Won, the team has found the spurious correlation between data collection pattern of drug characteristics and approved indications of drug. They also found that train-test split based on random sampling led to the overestimation of the performances of existing DR models. Jung-Hyun Won stressed that the team is currently reformulating drug repositioning problem as predicting investigational disease and generating eligibility criteria of clinical trials for a drug-disease pair.

Technology showcase can be watched the following youtube thumbnail.

CCADD had a year-end workshop on December 21st, 2022. This year, Prof. Howard Lee and the members of CCADD were joined by PMATCH (the tech start-up led by Prof. Howard) and Dr. Hyun-Ah Lee (our respected alumnus). The workshop was also delightful because some of Prof. Howard’s part-time students and Yujin (our student intern) were there too.

The first session gave a look back on 2022. Accomplishments—academic and otherwise—were shared and celebrated. Prof. Howard cheered the members for their effort and delivered a message of hope for the coming year. The following sessions laid out some concrete plans and goals for 2023, such as attending conferences domestic and abroad and streamlining journal club and book reading programs.

In the afternoon, PMATCH took us down memory lane about all the footsteps leading up to the development of its app, Battery, and its upcoming global debut at CES^® 2023, one of the world’s biggest tech event. Yoomin Jeon, the Chief Technology Officer of PMATCH, stitched all the key moments into a single narrative, which had been so far shared with CCADD in parts.

Perhaps, one of the most anticipated sessions was Dr. Hyun-Ah Lee’s talk about her career after graduation. She traced back her memory from the time when she was studying under Prof. Howard to where she is today. She admitted her life as a PhD student trying to be on par with the rigor and the expectation of Prof. Howard was never easy but definitely worth pursuing. More importantly, she urged us to hang in there as it will all pay off one day, and her sincerity resonated with all of us.

The day’s workshop closed with a special lecture by Prof. Howard. He proposed a vision for CCADD in 2023, exhorting us to recognize the need for honing the necessary skillsets and realigning our research area. Most importantly, Prof. Howard’s closing remark that CCADD should make a bigger leap forward in 2023 taking risks and facing challenges inspired us like nothing else.

Yesol Hong won the Excellent Research Award at the 30th Annual Conference of the Korean Society for Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics (KSCPT), December 1-3, 2022, held at Bexco, Busan, South Korea. The title of YeSol's presentation was "One-year follow-up of patients with COVID-19: Analysis of new-onset disease after COVID-19 diagnosis using Real-World Data". She discussed the results of an analysis of the occurrence of disease in patients with COVID-19 over a year using two different real-world data sets. One of her analysis results was a nation-wide study, which was significant in that it included the largest number of study subjects among the studies analyzing the post-COVID-19-condition in Korea. Jung Hyun Won equally contributed to this study with Professor Howard Lee serving as the principal investigator.

Additionally, Siun Kim, Yoona Choi, David Seung U Lee also presented their research through poster exhibition at the conference. 

Full presentations can be watched at the following YouTube links: 

YeSol had the honor to deliver oral presentation and won the Excellent Research Award at 2022 fall conference hosted by the Korean Society of Medical Informatics(KOSMI). YeSol has presented her work entitled "Effectiveness and safety of sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 inhibitors(SGLT2i) added to mono, dual or triple treatment in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus(T2DM)". She discussed the additive efficacy in glycemic control and the tolerability of SGLT2i in T2DM patients when combined with other antihyperglycemic agents, such as metformin, sulfonylureas, and dipeptidyl peptidase-4 inhibitors using real-world data. Yoona Choi, TaeKyu Chung, and Yoomin Jeon also contributed to this study as co-researchers, with Professor Howard Lee serving as the principle investigator.

The conference was a three-day event (from Nov 23rd, 2022 to Nov 25th, 2022) and was held at The International Convention Center, Jeonbuk National University, Jeonju, Jeonbuk, South Korea. This conference, the host(KOSMI) organized the event around the theme, "The Power and Value of Healthcare Data Linkage". The conference was full of enlightening speeches that reflected the progress made in the field of medical informatics. With a total of 1,039 participants, this conference was held on the largest scale ever among KOSMI conferences.