The book The Age of Biopharmaceuticals, written by Prof. Howard Lee and Siun Kim, Ph.D. a student of CCADD, 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. The book worth 8 million Korean-won will be distributed to public libraries across the country. In 2020, 550 books were selected from a total of 7,184 candidates. The book The Age of Biopharmaceuticals is Coming was selected as an excellent book in the field of technology science. 

Besides, thanks to the interest of many readers, the book went into the second printing. An article reporting the publication appeared in the June issue of Newsletter, GSCST SNU.

Prof. Howard Lee has officially expressed strong disapproval of the reimbursement for 'cheobyak' or the mixture of herbal (or natural products-derived) drugs. In a roundtable provoked by the impending reimbursement decision of cheobyak by the Korea National Health Insurance Service against the objections by medical and scientific societies altogether, Prof. Lee raised intense disagreement with the government policy to support reimbursement of cheobyak. Prof. Lee argued that cheobyak has never been shown to be efficacious and safe through scientific assessments by the regulatory agency such as the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety in Korea, not to mention its uncertain quality as a medicine. He continued, discussing "The cost-effectiveness of any cheobyak has never been validly studied and confirmed, which is the minimal requirement for any drug approved and listed for health insurance reimbursement in Korea." 

A summary of Prof. Lee's presentation at the roundtable can be found in many newspaper articles, one example of which is here. Additionally, his full presentation has been uploaded to YouTube as seen below:        

Jeong Ah Choi is an administrative assistant to Prof. Howard Lee and accountant. Jeong Ah has joined CCADD in June, 2020, and is in charge of budgeting, expense tracking and filing for the research projects of CCADD. Jeong Ah is also responsible for general office tasks such as coordinating meetings and events and record keeping. Prior to joining CCADD, Jeong Ah has worked at the Industry-Academic Cooperation Foundation, Ajou University, in the capacity of research budget administrator. Please welcome Jeong Ah!

On December 4-5, 2019, CCADD and Selvas AI Inc held their first-ever joint workshop on Common Data Model (CDM)-based simulation system project, which were co-awarded by the South Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy (MOTIE) (a link to previous news). The project is coined as SUCCESS or 'Smart User-friendly CDM-based Clinical trial dEsign Support System. The main objective of this workshop was to share what Selvas and CCADD have accomplished during the first-year of this on-going project and to plan for the following year. 

On the first day, a hands-on tutorial on ATLAS was led by two invited outside speakers, Mr. Jaehyung Cho and Mr. Chungsoo Kim from Ajou University. ATLAS is a web-based open-source platform developed by the OHDSI community aiming to perform complex patient/population studies on OMOP CDM databases and visualize the results. This hands-on tutorial focused on presenting the fundamental principles and implementations on ATLAS, covering CDM vocabulary tables, standard vocabulary browsing, concept sets, cohort definition/phenotyping, and population-level estimation. The tutorial was well organized and interactive, which helped all the participants better understand the implications and possibilities of ATLAS for SUCCESS.

On the second day, a year-end performance review for SUCCESS was presented by Mr. Charles Joochul Lee, a general manager of Selvas AI Inc., who has led the project in collaboration with Prof. Howard Lee. Additionally, a domain expert in the field of clinical trials, Ms. Jumi Han, a team leader, Daewoong Pharmaceuticals, was invited. Ms. Han gave the team an instantaneous feedback on the aspects of practical implementation of SUCCESS. This session of the workshop was a unique opportunity to identify ways to improve the performance of SUCCESS. 

Yes, Boca Raton is in Florida, the average temperature of which in December is 24 degrees Celsius! Several CCADD members including Prof. Lee, Yoomin Jeon, Taekyu Chung, Siun Kim and Junsik Moon attended the Eighteenth International Conference on Machine Learning(ML) and Applications (ICMLA) held at Marriott Hotel, Boca Raton, Florida, USA on December 16-19, 2019. Like the subtropical climate of the city, the conference was also full of passionate researchers and practitioners presenting their latest achievements and innovations in the area of ML.

Started by three excellent keynote lectures, each day in the morning except for the first day, concerning the robustness/efficiency of data management, which was also aimed to attract researchers and application developers from a wide range of ML related areas, the conference covered not only an urgent need for machine learning to address new challenges from the recent emergence of Big Data processing but also theoretical research/application in ML.

Prof. Howard Lee and CCADD’s members were able to garner meaningful insight in each section describing machine learning techniques applied to real-world problems and interdisciplinary research involving machine learning in various fields such as medicine, biology, industry, security, and education. This gained insight was partly assisted by ‘Artificial Intelligence for New Drug Development and Clinical Application’, a course organized by Prof. Lee and taught by CCADD members last semester. Joining the conference, Prof. Lee seemed to be reinforced by the insight that could refine and strengthen the scope, direction, and emphasis of the research for CCADD.

After the conference, CCADD’s members visited Key West, the continental southernmost point, which is the starting point of U.S. Route 1, the longest north-south road in the United States. Not only enjoying classy seafood cuisine and stunning scenery while on road, but they had a chance to share interesting ideas as to the new research direction of CCADD.