Yoona Choi and Jung-Hyun Won attended the 65th Annual Meeting & Exposition of the American Society of Hematology (ASH), which took place from December 9 to 12, 2023, in San Diego, USA. Annually, the ASH conference brings together healthcare professionals, researchers, clinicians, and academics from around the globe to explore advancements in hematology. This prestigious event not only focuses on the study, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of blood disorders but also features a variety of social events and opportunities for collaboration and the sharing of insights among experts in the field. Official photos from ASH are available here.

At the 'Outcomes Research—Lymphoid Malignancies: Poster II' session, Yoona Choi, serving as the first author and representing the entire research team, presented a study titled 'Evaluating the Effectiveness and Safety of Prephase Steroid Treatment before Remission Induction Chemotherapy in Pediatric Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia: A Common Data Model-Based Real-World Data Approach.' This study investigated steroid pretreatment in pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) patients undergoing remission induction chemotherapy (RIC), with the aim of reducing complications such as tumor lysis syndrome (TLS). Analyzing data from Seoul National University Hospital and Catholic University Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital, the study compared patients who received steroid pretreatment at least seven days before RIC with those who did not. The findings indicated a significant reduction in TLS incidence in the pretreated group. While overall survival rates were higher in this group, the difference was not statistically significant. These results provide important real-world evidence for the effectiveness of steroid pretreatment in reducing TLS risk in pediatric ALL patients.

This study was part of a larger project, funded by a grant from the Ministry of Health and Welfare, aiming to develop a disease registry database for pediatric ALL using real-world data in the clinical data warehouse (CDW) of Seoul National University Hospital and Catholic University Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital, thereby generating real-world evidence for pediatric ALL. 

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.

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. 

The book 'There's no such thing as K-Quarantine', written by Prof.Howard Lee, Jung-Hyun Won, YeSol Hong and 13 others, was selected in the liberal arts section of the Sejong Cultural Book Program this year. The Sejong Cultural Book Program is organized by the Publication industry Promotion Agency of Korea. This program aims to promote domestic publishing activities and to build a knowledge-based society by selecting outstanding books among those published throughout the year. Books worth 8 million Korean won will be distributed to public libraries nationwide. In 2022, 550 books were selected from a total of 8,698 candidates. The book There's no such thing as K-quarantine was selected as an excellent book in the field of technology science. 

Prof. Howard Lee was invited to a session at the Spring Conference, 2021, organized and sponsored by The Pharmaceutical Society of Korea, April 22, 2021, held in the K-Hotel, Seoul, Korea. In the session, Prof. Lee introduced the audience to a dimension reduction model that CCADD has developed to make clinical trial feasibility assessments efficient, practical, and realistic. The research project has been supported for three years by the National Research Foundation of Korea, which is expected to end by this year. Based on the positive results of the research, particularly in the area of type II diabetes mellitus, a patent has been filed, and CCADD plans to expand it to other disease areas too. Prof. Lee has emphasized in the session that artificial intelligence technologies can and should be applied to clinical drug development to make it more versatile and agile. His talk was well-received. 

Prof. Howard Lee has been recently awarded a government grant from the Small Grant Exploratory Research (SGER) Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea or NRF to develop a model for assessing clinical trials feasibility. The total research funding was $223,000 over a 3 year period (11/01/18 to 10/31/21), which is equivalent to 250 million Korean Won. After a year of an initial stage of research, funding may be continued for additional two more years based on satisfactory progress. The title of Prof. Lee's proposed research plan was "A Dimensionality Reduction Model to increase the efficiency and accuracy of clinical trial feasibility assessment using electronic medical records". This research aimed to develop a machine learning-based dimensionality reduction model to identify the common sensitive eligibility features (cSEFs) that could increase the efficiency of clinical trials feasibility in the presence of intended patient population characteristics. Feature Selection algorithms will be used to enhance the performance of this machine learning model. 

Dr. Jeong-An Gim has been awarded a government grant from the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Korea on September 1, 2018 to study epigenetic/epigenomic changes after drug treatment. The grant will cover a year and the total research funding is $40,000 or ~40 million Korean Won. The title of Dr. Gim's research was "An Association Study Between the Pharmacoepigenomic Patterns of Drug-metabolizing Enzymes and the Pharmacokinetics of Tacrolimus", which aimed to identify several sensitive genetic regions associated with the pharmacokinetics of tacrolimus, an immunosuppressive agent frequently used in transplant patients. Blood samples for this proposed study have been already collected from two previous studies ( Choi et al., Kim et al., 2017 ), and the samples will be outsourced to Theragen Etex for the next generation sequencing (NGS) analysis. 

The proposed study is the first of its kind applying the state-of-the-art technologies to investigating the epigenetic/epigenomic effect on the exposure to tacrolimus in humans. Dr. Gim has been interested in finding an optimal epigenetic state to maximize the efficacy of a drug while minimizing potential adverse events, and tacrolimus will be his first bet. 

Prof. Lee congratulated Dr. Gim, saying "Converging the principles of clinical pharmacology, genomics, and eipgenetics/epigenomics, we will have a much better understanding how humans handle the administered drug." Prof. Lee added, "Dr. Gim's approach is innovative, and his research exemplifies how convergent approaches can be adopted to solve problems in drug development."