On February 24^th, CCADD celebrated the graduation of two of its members, Siun Kim and David Seung U Lee. Siun, an applied bioengineering major, started his joint Masters and PhD program in 2018 and studied under Prof. Howard Lee’s guidance. He received his PhD in Medicine for his thesis on applying natural language processing technology to drug safety monitoring. David, a molecular medicine and biopharmaceutical sciences (MMBS) major, joined CCADD in 2021 and has since studied under Prof. Howard Lee. He received his MSc in Medicine for his study on clinical characteristics associated with dulaglutide treatment adherence.

Siun, for all his contribution to CCADD, embarked on a new career as a postdoctoral researcher at Seoul National University Hospital Biomedical Research Institute. There, he will focus on developing AI models for the prediction of hypoglycemia during dialysis and the analysis of nursing notes of kidney surgery recipients. David will continue to study under Prof. Howard as a PhD student starting 2023.

We congratulate on their accomplishment and convey our best wishes at their new start.

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. 

In the 8th Global Bio Conference sponsored by the Korea Ministry of Food and Drug Safety on September 6, 2022, Prof. Howard Lee emphasized the unique nature of biologics in comparison with conventional small-molecule drugs, particularly in terms of their clinical safety and accessibility. "The safety of biologics should be ascertained even after they are approved for marketing since they are way different from the traditional chemistry-based drugs", Prof. Lee argued. Prof. Lee further pointed out the uniqueness of biologics by saying "We have to be well prepared not only for the utility, but for the potential safety issues in every single biologic, which is anticipated to be more frequently used in a clinical setting." Prof. Lee also addressed the reimbursement for biologics because they are typically more expensive although their efficacy can be dramatic.

More details about Prof. Lee's presentation at the GBC can be found at the following online articles: 1 and 2. 

Prof. Howard Lee emphasized the role of regulatory science in the development and fast introduction of advanced medical products including therapeutics, devices, diagnostics, and vaccines to patients in need. He was invited to the fourth series of the Regulatory Science Innovation Forum on May 3, 2022, where Prof. Lee proposed several strategies to facilitate the principles of regulatory science to be implemented in every decision the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS) makes. Prof. Lee also stressed MFDS to self-evolve to become a visionary leadership organization through regulatory science, starting from regulatory agency to scientific agency to public health agency. Several newspaper reported what Prof. Lee presented at the forum: 1, 2, and 3. 

A full video clip of Prof. Lee's presentation can be watched by clicking the following YouTube link. 

Jeon Y, Lee N, Baek S, Choi JD, Jhee S, Lee H. A Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo- and Active-Controlled, Escalating Single-Dose Study to Evaluate the Safety, Tolerability, Pharmacokinetic, Pharmacodynamic Profiles of Subcutaneous Eflapegrastim in Healthy Japanese and Caucasian Subjects. Drugs R&D (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40268-021-00379-8

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.

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.