Prof. Howard Lee was invited to a seminar organized by the Pohang Innovation Salon on March 24, 2022 at the NeoImmuneTech Lounge located in the Bio Open Innovation Center, POSTECH. PIS is an interdisciplinary forum consisting of people with different expertise in drug and device developments. 

Prof. Lee's seminar was entitled 'How to design early clinical development studies', where Prof. Lee introduced the audience to various design issues pertaining to early phase clinical trials with a strong emphasis on the first-in-human study. Prof. Lee also shared his experience in planning, designing, and executing early clinical development studies.

Prof. Lee's professional relationship was dated back to the early start-up days of Genexine, the mother company of NIT. Prof. Lee performed the FIH study of GX-I7 for Genexine, a hybrid Fc-fused human IL-7, the results of which were published a couple of years ago. Furthermore, Prof. Lee conducted a microtracing study with GX-I7, which was sponsored by the Korea Clinical Trials Global Initiative or KCGI.   

The seminar was well-attended by both offline and online participants. 

Three other MDs were also interviewed and the detailed report of Prof. Lee's interview can be found here. 

Prof. Howard Lee was featured at the first episode of FOCUS, a YouTube-based lecture program by Seoul National University Hospital, where Prof. Lee introduced each stage of new drug development. Two additional episodes will be aired through FOCUS soon, i.e., How Covid-19 vaccines were developed and how the Korean biopharmaceutical industry can be a global leader.  

Prof. Lee's first episode can be watched by clicking the following thumbnail; 

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.”

Yoomin Jeon and Siun Kim were awarded the Best Oral Presentation Award at the 2021 KSCPT Conference.The Best Oral Presentation Award aims to recognize outstanding scientific papers delivered through oral presentations at the conference. The awards were given to oral presentations of the paper titled "A Randomized, Double-blind, Placebo- and Active-controlled, Escalating Single-dose Study to Evaluate Safety, Tolerability, Pharmacokinetic, and Pharmacodynamic Profiles of Subcutaneous Eflapegrastim in Healthy Japanese and Caucasians" and "An Annotated Corpus and Natural Language Processing Model for Drug Safety Information Extraction from Free-texts Reporting Adverse Events" for Yoomin and Siun, respectively. 

Yoomin presented the results of a phase 1 clinical trial evaluating the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of eflapegrastim following subcutaneous administration to healthy subjects. Eflapegrastim (Rolontis®) is a novel, long-acting Granulocyte-Colony Stimulating Factor (G-CSF) being studied as a treatment for neutropenia that utilizes Hanmi's Labscovery, a proprietary platform technology. 

Siun presented an annotated corpus for extracted Korean adverse events using free-texts from the KAERS (Korean Adverse Event Reporting System) database. To this end, Siun Kim developed deep learning models that automatically extract medication and adverse event information, cooperating with MILAB in Seoul National University.

Prof. Kyeong-Ryoon Lee lectured at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Korean Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, held in Jeju-do, Korea, November 11-13, 2021. The title of his talk was Development of Phyisologically-Based Pharmacokinetic Model for Orally-Administered Fexuprazan in Humans. In the lecture, Prof. Lee introduced the audience step-by-step to the drug development project he led in collaboration with Daewoong Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., Seoul, Korea, where a PBPK model developed using pre-clinical animal data accurately predicted the PK profiles of fexuprazan, a potassium-competitive acid blocker, in humans. Prof. Lee's presentation was based on a research paper he recently published, and was well-received.

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.