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.

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.

CCADD welcomes new interns!

Starting from January 4th, Minjung Kim, Du-Hyeong Lee, and Chaeyun Cho have participated in the 2021 Winter Internship Program at CCADD. David Seung-U Lee, a prospective student of the Department of Molecular Medicine and Biopharmaceutical Sciences, Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology, Seoul National University, has also joined the program as an intern before his semester starts.

Minjung is currently a Hispanic Language and Literature major at Seoul National University and pursues biology as a double major. Her research interest lies in policy analysis of Korea’s integrated clinical research system.

Du-Hyeong is a rising junior at Korea University, focusing on mathematics and statistics. He plans to delve into statistical methods and machine learning for clinical trials and PBPK (physiologically based pharmacokinetics) modeling during his internship.

Chaeyun studies chemical and biological engineering at Korea University, and she joined the team to study clinical drug evaluation and nano drug toxicity.

Last but not least, David has studied English Literature. He is interested in pharmacometrics and drug-drug interaction.

Living up to its motto, CCADD plans to have the new members fully immersed in and orientated to diverse activities including research, studies, and daily routines of a graduate student. As CCADD is gearing toward a new journey, with new members on board, the contribution from the interns and synergy between them and the current members is greatly expected. CCADD also hopes to find gold nuggets in the interns as much as they would do from the program.

Once again, welcome to CCADD!

Prof. Howard Lee spoke about the utility of artificial intelligence (AI) in clinical drug development at the KDDW or Korean Digestive Disease Week 2020, organized by the Korean Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, on November 20, 2020, held at the Swiss Grand Hotel Convention Center. The conference was aired online and the program is shown below:

The title of Prof. Lee's presentation was 'Artificial Intelligence in Drug Development: Clinical Pharmacology Perspective', and he talked about the potentials and pitfalls of AI in clinical drug development. In his talk, Prof. Lee emphasized the fact that most of the AI technologies that have been ever adopted in drug development are primarily in the area of drug discovery, whereas the preclinical and clinical developments have not witnessed active adoption of AI technologies although this trend can change all of a sudden. Particularly, Prof. Lee set aside the one-thirds of his presentation as to how CCADD could have developed a series of machine learning models to reduce the dimensionality of eligibility criteria to assess clinical trial feasibility using several feature selection algorithms. Below is the photo of those who have contributed to the work Prof. Lee introduced in his talk at the conference. 

CCADD has successfully assembled an interdisciplinary research team at SNU, interested in the application of AI to the development and optimal use of drugs. Recently, the team has received a small, but important, intramural grant to coordinate a series of forums to stimulate, develop, and nurture new, innovative research ideas in the field, entitled “Artificial intelligence for drug development and its optimal use (PI: Prof. Howard Lee)”. Prof. Young Kee Shin, Prof. Eugene C. Yi, Prof. Park Young Joo (from MMBS), Prof. Bongki Moon (from the Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering), Prof. Jung Mi Oh (from the College of Pharmacy), Prof. Jinwook Choi (from the Interdisciplinary Program in Bioengineering), and graduate students in the research teams will meet regularly starting early June 2020 through mid August.

The intramural grant of 3 million Korean won or $2,500 was awarded by the SNU AI Committee. Through the forum, recent progresses in applying AI and machine learning techniques to drug development and its optimal use will be reviewed. Furthermore, the forum will actively seek novel research topics in the fields, which CCADD hopes to end up leading to new grant applications.

Six undergraduate students (Sung Jong Kim, Hwe Won Kim, Jinyeong Yang, Song Yeon Oh, Chae Jeong Lee, and Yura Hwang) joined CCADD for the 2020 Winter Smart Internship, and they will spend the next 8 weeks in exploring the research environment at CCADD while having opportunities to participate in the ongoing research projects.

Sung Jong Kim is a fourth-year undergraduate student at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, double majoring in Molecular Biotechnology and English-Korean Interpretation and Translation Studies. Studying biology and biotechnologies, Sung Jong has developed a broad interest in pharmacology and computer science. He is looking forward to learning NONMEM, an analysis program for pharmacokinetic pharmacodynamic (PKPD) modeling, during his internship program.

Song Yeon Oh is also a senior student at HanKuk University of Foreign Studies, and has studied Environmental Science. Song Yeon's research interests include applying artificial intelligence (AI) technologies into the pharmaceutical area to make drug development processes more efficient. During the internship program, she wants to learn methods to analyze medical data using computer language, such as Python and R, by participating in the CCADD's current projects.

Chae Jeong Lee is a second-year student at HanKuk University of Foreign Studies, majoring in Biomedical Engineering and Computer and Electronic Systems Engineering. Being familiar with C and Python, Chae Jeong wants to participate in CCADD's current AI projects such as those awarded by National Institute of Food Drug Safety Evaluation (NIFDS) and South Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy (MOTIE). Through this winter internship program, she is looking forward to learning R to improve her coding skills.

Hwe Won Kim is a fourth-year undergraduate student at Konkuk University. She studies Converged Material Engineering and Environmental Engineering. Prior to the internship program at CCADD, Hwe Won worked as an intern researcher in the Department of Stem cell and Regenerative Biotechnology laboratory and has become interested in pharmacology and AI technologies. Through the internship program, she is looking forward to learning the basics of clinical pharmacology and AI algorithms applicable to pharmaceutical area.

Jinyeong Yang is a second-year student at College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Seoul National University. Jinyeong was involved in research project project to develop a liquid bandage for patients with atopy to prevent potential secondary infections. Through her past experience, Jinyeong has become more interested in PK, PD, and development process of a drug. She is looking forward to learning the pharmacology and drug development process, as well as experiencing the research environment in graduate school. 

Yura Hwang is a senior student at Pusan University with a major in Molecular Biology and a minor in Chemistry. Previously, Yura worked in PRG S&T, a pharmaceutical start-up, where she has developed an interest in theoretical and computational methods to describe variability in PK. She is looking forward to learning NONMEM during her internship program.

This 2020 winter internship program will provide participants with opportunities to learn clinical pharmacology, machine learning algorithms, and computer languages for data analysis as shown below. CCADD wholeheartedly welcomes the 6 intern students, and hopes them to enjoy, learn, and experience as much as they want and can during the rest of their internship programs.

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.

The 2019 fall conference of The Korean Society of Medical Informatics (KOSMI), organized by Kyungpook National University Hospital (KNUH), was held November 8-9, 2019, at the Global Plaza, Kyunpook National University, Daegu. Prof. Howard Lee, Yoomin Jeon and Junsik Moon participated in the conference.

The conference presented 19 symposia, 6 oral presentation sessions of pre-selected paper submissions, and 3 tutorials in healthcare information, pharmaceutical and big data research which focused on analysis, application and standardization of data based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Sharing research ideas and analysis techniques, the attendees had an in-depth discussion on emerging issues and utilization in the fields of medical informatics.

On the second day, Prof. Lee chaired one of the oral presentation sessions entitled "New Drug and Pharmacovigilance", where he stressed full understanding of the research domain by communicating with experts in each research field. On the other hand, Yoomin presented two posters titled 'A Dimensionality Reduction Model to Increase the Efficiency and Accuracy of Clinical Trial Feasibility Assessment Using Electronic Medical Records' and 'A CDM-based Clinical Trial to Evaluate the Efficacy and Safety of SGLT2 Inhibitors as Add-on Treatment in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus on Metformin, Sulfonylurea and/or DPP-4 Inhibitors'. Yoomin's poster presentations were well received.

Through the conference, the three members of CCADD were delighted to get introduced to the leading academicians and industry experts in the field of medical informatics. Furthermore, Prof. Lee and two CCADD members had a fun discussion that helped them look deeply into their current activities and direction of future research. Their collected insights out of the conference will be further discussed at the upcoming year-end workshop in early December.