Yoomin Jeon and Yuchae Jung attended the 15th Annual Pharmaceutical IT Congress in London (UK) 27-28 September, 2017 and presented two posters that detailed the core concept and framework of P-MATCH (Precision-Machine Learning AssisTed Clinical Trial Eligibility Assessment using Health Record) and chatbot service to find the most appropriate clinical trials for patients. Their works were extremely well received.
The Congress was well attended by >200 delegates from world renowned academic institutions, hospitals, global pharmaceutical organisations and leading biotechnology companies. Yoomin and Yuchae also actively participated in 40 other presentations and case studies focusing on the key developments in Big Data and analytics, lab informatics, collaboration, digital health, wearable technologies, blockchain technology, and artificial intelligence in drug development.
For more information about 15th Annual Pharmaceutical IT Congress, please click this link.
In addition, you may want to contact Yoomin or Yuchae for their posters.
CCADD members attended the KAIST CHIP (Bio-Healthcare Innovation and Policy) symposium on September 20, 2017 held at the Novotel Ambassador Seoul Gangnam. At the symposium, Dr. Howard Lee talked about the team's collective perspective on the utility and future potential of the EHR4CR project by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) in Europe, particularly in terms of streamlining the process by which clinical trial participants are screened and enrolled based on their eligibility assessment aided by artificial intelligence.
Check out the YouTube video, which is pretty funny but tells who we are in only 30 seconds. Hyewon and other lab members did a fantastic job! Kudos and congratulations!
The name CCADD was the culmination of several chalk talks and an overnight workshop among the initial team members (Howard, Yoomin, Siun, and Hyun A). We were very much interested in creating a new center, which focuses on generating innovative convergence knowledge to revolutionize the clinical drug development paradigm. After a series of conversations, discussions, and heated debates sometimes, the name Convergence for Alternative Drug Development Sciences (CADDS) was proposed. However, we soon realized that ‘alternative drug development’ could be misleading since alternative drugs were not what we intended to concentrate on. So, CADDS was discarded.
After several more conversations, the name Center for Convergence Approaches in Drug Development (CCADD) finally came up. Everyone liked this name because it sounded cool (pronounced “See-Cad”), was easy to memorize, and contained the first letters of what we later dubbed ‘core values’ for us, i.e., challenge, creativity, accountability, diversity, and difference. Voila!
The next thing we had to do was to design a logo that could visually capture the essence of CCADD and its people. It soon turned out that, however, it was not something that we could do by ourselves. Instead, we needed help from a professional designer, and Chloe Minkyoung Lee at Studio PEEK was the one we looked for. She was not only talented, but patient to wait until we were fully satisfied with every single detail. The result was a beautiful logo for CCADD.
The chains left to the text in the logo symbolize links between various disciplines through convergence approaches. They also denote two small letters d, which stand for drug development. Furthermore, if you take out the short bar from the end of each chain, it becomes letter c. So, now we have two c's, and they represent center for convergence. Voila again!
Dr. Yuchae Jung has become a new member of CCADD as a BK21 Professor affiliated with the Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology, Seoul National University. Previously, Dr. Jung was a Research Professor (2016-2017) and a Research Fellow (2013-2016) at the Department of Pharmacology, Sookmyung Women's University (2016-2017). Dr. Jung also had post-doc research experience at Brigham and Women's Hospital (2010-2012) and SUNY at Albany (2008-2010) in the USA.
Dr. Jung has received a research grant from the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning in Korea, entitled “Smart psychology analysis and healing therapy algorithm”. Dr. Jung’s current research interests include development of innovative convergent analysis methods for biomedical data and artificial intelligence-based patient referral system for clinical trials.
Dr. Howard Lee welcomed Dr. Jung, saying “It is just a right time for CCADD to have Dr. Jung on board. With Dr. Jung’s broad experience and skill sets in computational biomedical science, CCADD’s research palette will have more colors to advance its mission.”
Two young future leaders (Left:Se Rin Lee, Right:Hyewon Hwang) will spend the next eight weeks (July-August, 2017) at CCADD through the summer internship program at the Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology, Seoul National University. Se Rin goes to Seoul National University College of Engineering in association with the Department of Industrial Engineering. Hyewon Hwang is a fourth-year undergraduate student at the College of Liberal Studies, Seoul National University with a double major in statistics and anthropology.
Se Rin is well-versed in computer programming including Java and Python. She is interested in pursuing a career in the pharmaceutical industry, which has prompted her to take a previous internship at Pfizer Korea, where she explored the possibility of big data mining to increase the success probability of clinical trials. On the other hand, Hyewon wants to study the utility of statistics in guiding decision makings in drug development. She also has an excellent command of English.
Dr. Howard Lee spoke at the Regulatory Symposium on May 15, 2017, sponsored by the Korea National Enterprise for Clinical Trials, where he emphasized the potential utility of artificial intelligence and machine learning to streamline clinical trial processes. Particularly, Dr. Lee focused on the current practice of laborious and lengthy eyeballing assessment of patient eligibility, which is inefficient and prone to human errors. Machine learning algorithms using patient’s electronic medical records and clinical trial vectors, strengthened by natural language processing and supervised term expansion, can change the way that clinical research coordinators and physicians screen in potentially eligible patients into the clinical trial. The result is reduction in labor and increase in accuracy. CCADD is looking for collaboration partners in this emerging research field.
The first official website of CCADD is successfully launched today! Please go to http://ccadd.snu.ac.kr/ and look around to find more interesting information.
After months of hard work, dedication, and trial and errors, the CCADD official website has taken its form, which consists of separate tabs of About, People, Research, Publications, Teaching, and Board, the last of which has three sub-tabs: News, Announcements, and Blog.
Yoomin Jeon is a PhD candidate at the Department of Transdisciplinary Studies, Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology, Seoul National University. Prior to joining CCADD, she graduated from Purdue University in the USA with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering.
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