Convergence Newsletter, a yearly news article published by Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology, Seoul National University, highlighted two stories from CCADD.

First, the afterword of Chaeyun (then chemical and biological engineering major at Korea University) and her reflection on the 2021 Winter Internship at CCADD received a spotlight dividend in the 2020 Winter Joint Research Program corner.

Looking back on what she did, she is glad that she jumped at the opportunity. For her, being part of the project, “Predicting drug-drug interaction based on machine learning,” was a storehouse of lessons. She was able to gain hands-on experience in the area she had been passionate about, and she could gain a concrete understanding of machine learning technology and its applications to pharmacology. Also, she fondly recalls how she could pick others’ brains while trying to keep up with the rigorous “Book Reading” schedule, during which the CCADD members, interns included, finished off three textbooks on Natural Language Processing and Python. As her closing remark, she admitted the internship experience was a gratifying step toward living her dream as an aspiring future pharmacologist, and she thanked all the lab members, and especially Prof. Lee, for the opportunity and all the supports they’d shown to her.

Next in the Issue Focus section, which showcased the wonderful accomplishments of the professors at Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology, Seoul National University, Prof. Lee made the headlines. The highlight covers the news that 세종도서 has named the book Siun Kim (a PhD student at CCADD) and Prof. Lee co-wrote, “바이오 의약품 시대가 온다,” as one of the greatest works in 2020. The book was touted for how it effortlessly explicates the complicated drug-approval process. Also, by being comprehensive in its cover of the knowledge (e.g., basic biology) and the domain-specific one (e.g., monoclonal antibodies, gene therapies, and the difference between generics and biologics), the book gently nudges readers toward thinking like biologists and engages them in the collective effort to raise awareness of biologics. This book also has its merit in being accessible to the readers outside the scientific domain, and it’s inviting readers from diverse swaths of to the question of how we will make the great leap forward to the future of biologics.

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 chaired a forum, organized and sponsored by DailyPharm, an online-only journalism company focusing on the pharmaceutical industry, on April 12, 2021. The title of the forum was 'Reimbursement System for High-Priced Drugs in Korea', which has become an issue as more and more advanced therapeutics such as cell and/or gene therapies are introduced as a breakthrough treatment option. The forum had four panelists, three of whom represented the pharmaceutical industry and one the Korea Ministry of Health and Welfare. 

It was a coincidental and timely event because Prof. Lee and Yoona Choi have been working an a research project with an aim to increase patient access  to new drugs in Korea. This project was sponsored by the Future Health Network, and the second round of the research project is under discussion. The results of the first round of the project has been published in a peer-reviewed Journal as a research article. 

The details of the forum can be read and watched here.

In the first quarter of 2021, CCADD got off to a good start with a new project deal with Korea Ginseng Corporation (KGC).

Korea’s leading ginseng brand for over a century, KGC has a distinguished track record of making quality dietary products. CCADD, on the other side of the deal, has been receiving high marks on its clinical science expertise. So, the handshake between the two definitely holds the promise of achieving something big and previously unimagined.

And the promise is becoming real. Staring this March, KGC and CCADD set out on a project to develop a mobile healthcare application called ‘Care Now Q.’ Once complete, the mobile application will be the first in the market that utilizes data from medical checkups, direct-to-consumer genetic tests, and health survey results to recommend individualized health guidance and dietary supplement suggestions. For this ambitious project, CCADD will play an active role as a clinical expert and project manager, providing expertise and orchestrating the entire process. This project will be led by Yoomin Jeon (team leader), Jung-Hyun Won, and David Seung U Lee under the supervision of Prof. Howard Lee.

The stakes are high. This project will not only turn the idea of individualized health management into reality but also open the door for CCADD to a new area of research, moving forward.

March 2021 marks the end of CCADD's advisory to Idience's new molecule research.

Idience Co., LTD., a subsidiary of Ildong Pharmaceutical Co.,Ltd. (a major pharmaceutical company in Korea), is a No-Research-Development-Only (NRDO) company that focuses on developing and commercializing novel oncology drugs. 

Particularly, IDX-1197, a potent poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitors that causes synthetic lethality in cancer cells, has received the spotlight not only from the researchers, but from the investigators. Idience has successfully filed an investigational new drug (IND) for IDX-1197 to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last year. If approved and marketed, IDX-1197 will be used as monotherapy or an add-on to other anti-cancer agents targeting multiple solid tumors.

CCADD played a key role in speeding up the clinical development process of IDX-1197. From January to March 2021, CCADD analyzed preclinical and clinical data on other PARP inhibitors already developed or under development. Besides, CCADD comprehensively reviewed the results of completed, ongoing, or planned studies of IDX-1197, and compared the results with those of other PARP inhibitors such as Olaparib, Rucaparib, Niraparib, and Talazoparib. The analysis laid the foundation for how CCADD could help Idience better navigate the complex drug development process. This consulting project was led by Siun Kim, Yesol Hong, and Jung-Hyun Won under the auspice of Prof. Howard Lee.

On balance, it was a great experience to have worked with Idience on this project, and CCADD gives its best wishes to Idience for a successful global clinical development of IDX-1197 in the near future.

CCADD is breaking the ground for biomedical natural language processing or NLP!

On January 22^nd, 2021, CCADD was nominated by the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety to develop an NLP model that extracts core clinical information from unstructured data in the Korea Adverse Event Reporting System (KAERS). The total research fund amounts to two hundred million Korean won or a hundred and eighty thousand U.S. dollars. The project will be performed in collaboration with the Machine Intelligence lab in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Seoul National University (Prof. Gyo-Min Jung). 

For starters, CCADD will build a manually annotated dataset, which is indispensable to train and refine any machine learning algorithm including NLP. Next, CCADD plans to build the KAERS-BERT model, an NLP model specifically tuned to handle adverse drug events. The KAERS-BERT model will be pre-trained on KAERS text data, which then will be deployed to extract medical information from free texts, such as hand-written records of adverse events. Once complete, the KAERS-BERT model is expected to address many of the language ambiguities caused by the mixed use of English and Korean in medical domains already peppered with technical and medical jargons. The KAERS-BERT model will significantly improve the performance and the outcome of NLP tasks when extracting information from clinical notes written in English and Korean. 

Prof. Howard Lee, the PI of the grant, congratulated the team, saying "The grant awarding is timely and important since it will help CCADD enter a new area of biomedical NLP." At the conclusion of this project, CCADD will once again have secured its place as the leading lab in the field of convergence science between medicine, drug development, and machine learning including NLP. "This certainly provides CCADD with a momentum to transform into a frontrunner in the field", Prof. Lee added.

Prof. Howard Lee and some CCADD members including Yoomin Jeon, Yoona Choi, and YeSol Hong visited AstraZeneca Korea (AZK) on December 3, 2020. AZ is a research-intensive pharmaceutical company based in the UK and has recently developed a vaccine against COVID-19. AZK invited Prof. Lee to a big data seminar series, and he talked about the role of medical big data including real world data and artificial intelligence (AI) in drug discovery and development. Prof. Lee also discussed how pharmaceutical companies could prepare themselves for the active and efficient adoption of big data and AI technologies for the day-to-day drug development activities. 

Yoona and YeSol are actually a former employee to AZK, in the departments of medical affairs and marketing, respectively. Thus, this visit was a kind of homecoming, and everyone welcomed them.The visit was also a great opportunity for CCADD to introduce its research fields and capabilities to pharmaceutical companies. This opportunity will enable CCADD for exploring many collaboration projects with those who are involved in actual drug development, which will certainly fill a gap for CCADD such that academic research is well aligned with the reality.     

On October 30, 2020, CCADD and collaborating investigators had a workshop at Pocheon, Kyeonggi-do, to celebrate the consecutive two-year success for the common data model (CDM) expansion project. In this workshop, Prof. Howard Lee, Yoomin Jeon, Sium Kim, and Tae Kyu Chung summarized the project outcomes in the second year.

In a session, Tae Kyu evaluated the mapping rates of clinical terminologies, collected from the eligibility criteria, efficacy, and safety outcomes in sampled clinical trials at clinicaltrials.gov, to CDM standardized vocabularies. On the other hand, Prof. Lee detailed the pros and cons of the CDM analytical tools, such as the Atlas and methods Library, which may be used to conduct clinical trial feasibility, efficacy, and safety analysis in a virtual, simulation setting. After the presentations, the workshop participants actively engaged in an interactive discussion how to leverage the potentials of CDM, while minimizing its limitations, to clinical trials. They further discussed the project management plan for the upcoming year to improve project design, setup, execution, and close-out.

The CDM expansion project has been sponsored since 2019 by Korea Health Industry Development Institute through a three-year grant totaling 77 million Korean Won or $66,000.