On December 27th, 2023, CCADD held the year-end workshop at Front1, a startup hub at the heart of Seoul, where PMACH is based. This year, Prof. Howard Lee and the members of CCADD were joined by PMATCH and Dr. Siun Kim. The workshop went on in a dynamic atmosphere, welcoming both Prof. Howard’s part-time student and the interns for the upcoming internship program.

After a brief ice-breaking time, the main session started with a recap of the accomplishments of 2023, reflecting on the overall trajectory. Prof. Howard commended CCADD’s continuous growth in both research and publications. As preparation for 2024, the following session outlined a roadmap, encompassing detailed research ideas and plans for conference to attend in 2024.

The spotlight then turned to CCADD interns. Three passionate interns—Tang Chao, Seorin Choi, and Yunha Noh—who will join the 2024 winter internship program introduced themselves through "Who am I" presentations. Following this, Yujin expressed her aspirations for the path ahead as a new CCADD graduate research student. The workshop proceeded with a lecture on the challenges faced by postdoctoral researchers and strategies for maintaining a healthy mindset among graduate students.

Dr. Siun Kim took a special session to share insights into his post-doctoral journey following graduation. Delivering a lecture on the trending topic of "LLMs in medicine and drug development", he provided valuable perspectives and briefly introduced his ongoing research projects. He candidly shared reflections on the first-year post doc., emphasizing the professional commitment required in the field of research.

Finally, PMATCH summarized their achievements in 2023 and anticipated the upcoming year's developments. With the successful launch of the 'BATTERY' app and a triumphant debut at CES^® 2023, PMATCH envisions a promising future with new team members. Yoomin Jeon, the Chief Technology Officer of PMATCH, expressed her commitment to meeting user’s needs as a must-have app.

The workshop concluded with a keynote address by Prof. Howard. Introducing new trends in 2024, he emphasized the significance of adjusting our research focus and domain knowledge to take another leap forward. Prof. Howard’s central message highlighted 2024 as a pivotal year for CCADD's rebound and PMATCH's inaugural year of growth. 

CCADD had a year-end workshop on December 21st, 2022. This year, Prof. Howard Lee and the members of CCADD were joined by PMATCH (the tech start-up led by Prof. Howard) and Dr. Hyun-Ah Lee (our respected alumnus). The workshop was also delightful because some of Prof. Howard’s part-time students and Yujin (our student intern) were there too.

The first session gave a look back on 2022. Accomplishments—academic and otherwise—were shared and celebrated. Prof. Howard cheered the members for their effort and delivered a message of hope for the coming year. The following sessions laid out some concrete plans and goals for 2023, such as attending conferences domestic and abroad and streamlining journal club and book reading programs.

In the afternoon, PMATCH took us down memory lane about all the footsteps leading up to the development of its app, Battery, and its upcoming global debut at CES^® 2023, one of the world’s biggest tech event. Yoomin Jeon, the Chief Technology Officer of PMATCH, stitched all the key moments into a single narrative, which had been so far shared with CCADD in parts.

Perhaps, one of the most anticipated sessions was Dr. Hyun-Ah Lee’s talk about her career after graduation. She traced back her memory from the time when she was studying under Prof. Howard to where she is today. She admitted her life as a PhD student trying to be on par with the rigor and the expectation of Prof. Howard was never easy but definitely worth pursuing. More importantly, she urged us to hang in there as it will all pay off one day, and her sincerity resonated with all of us.

The day’s workshop closed with a special lecture by Prof. Howard. He proposed a vision for CCADD in 2023, exhorting us to recognize the need for honing the necessary skillsets and realigning our research area. Most importantly, Prof. Howard’s closing remark that CCADD should make a bigger leap forward in 2023 taking risks and facing challenges inspired us like nothing else.

As of November 1, researcher Jun-sik Moon moved to PMATCH., a start-up company that develops service and online platforms based on the innovative application of artificial Intelligence.

For the last two years (2019.10~2021.10) Jun-sik has worked hard to apply mathematical principal into the medical field, in particular, to enhance the result for artificial intelligence models from the Small Grant Exploratory Research (SGER) Program to develop a model for assessing clinical trials feasibility. Participating in workshops and projects related with artificial intelligence, he actively helped his fellows when mathematical approach was required.

Jun-sik briefly stated that, through novel programs and varied activities in CCADD, he experienced the significant time when he had an opportunity to broaden his horizons being on good terms with his colleagues. He also did not forget to mention that the treasured memories of CCADD will be in his heart and to thank Prof. Howard Lee and CCADD's members.

CCADD is looking forward to fulfilling his potentiality at PMATCH. beyond the confines of interdisciplinarity and always applauding for his coming carrier.

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. 

Prof. Howard Lee gave a talk at a pre-meeting workshop for the American College of Clinical Pharmacology Annual Meeting 2020 on September 16, 2020 (US EST). The title of Prof. Lee's presentation was 'Early Phase Clinical Trials in Korea'. In this talk, Prof. Lee explained how and why Korea has become one of the most attractive countries for clinical drug development, particularly during the past two decades. 

Prof. Lee also introduced the audience to some of his previous works in innovative clinical trial methodologies such as the microtracing technology, which he has spearheaded to make a useful clinical drug development tool in Korea. In association with this, Prof. Lee discussed two of his papers, one in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, the other Clinical and Translational Science, two reputable journals in clinical pharmacology. 

Three months ago, CCADD was awarded an intramural grant to present an AI forum to develop new research ideas, hopefully leading to an extramural grant application, for the efficient use of AI technologies for new drug development. Concluding this interdisciplinary endeavor, Prof. Howard Lee talked at the X+AI Workshop 2020 on August 24, along with 10 other PI's. The AI  forum Prof. Lee has led consisted of an interdisciplinary team of seven professors at SNU, and they have met weekly or biweekly a total of 8 times, all virtual due to the Corona pandemic, which is utterly unheard of. 

At the Workshop, Prof. Lee summarized what objectives the team has accomplished in various research areas in drug development where AI technologies can be adopted. Furthermore, Prof. Lee emphasized what hurdles needed to be overcome if more AI technologies could be employed to make the current drug developments practices faster, less costly, and more efficient. Prof. Lee's talk was well received, and he was approached by several PIs in other fields after the Workshop, who would like to extend their research network. 

CCADD is currently working on an extramural grant application based on the insights gained at the forum. In addition, Prof. Lee's presentation can be watched at YouTube below. 

The 2019 Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) Korea International Symposium was held on December 12-14 at Konjiam Resort, Korea. The symposium gathered nearly 400 participants from nine different countries, clearly showing a growing interest in the OHDSI community. The main session on the second day was followed by full-day tutorial workshops on the first day. The main session began with a warm welcome by Prof. Rong Min Baek, the Chairman of the Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Seoul National University College of Medicine, followed by an overview of the Korean OHDSI journey by Prof. Rae Woong Park, the Director and Professor at the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Ajou University School of Medicine. Other topics in the main session included an introduction to the European Health Data & Evidence Network (EHDEN) project, the OHDSI Initiative, and the FeederNet platform. The key message from all these presentations was on generating reproducible and reliable evidence from the existing clinical data standardized by the OHDSI common data model (CDM).  

Among three parallel sessions, 'Clinical trials in OHDSI' session was newly introduced this year. This parallel session purely focused on clinical trials, which consisted of the following three invited talks: 'Introduction to clinical trials', 'Smart User-friendly CDM-based Clinical trial dEsign Support System, SUCCESS', and 'OHDSI use case: clinical trial feasibility'. Charles Joochul Lee, a general manager of Selvas AI Inc., and Ms. Yoomin Jeon were invited to give a talk on the SUCCESS project, a CDM-based simulation system to assist clinical trial feasibility and designing clinical trials. Mr. Lee introduced the principles behind why and how SUCCESS was developed. Mr. Lee then gave a demonstration of SUCCESS system. To provide a better understanding of how a CDM-based simulation system can be implemented, Yoomin spoke about a CDM-based virtual clinical trial project (from the 2nd Korea Clinical Datathon) as a case study. Using the Ajou University Hospital CDM real-world data, her team has successfully shown that patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus, who are treated with metformin, sulfonylurea, and/or dipeptidylpeptidase-4 inhibitors (DPP4i), can benefit from add-on sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 inhibitors (SGLT2i) treatment in terms of both additional efficacy and comparable safety. Based on the analysis using this CDM data, adding an SGLT2i has shown an additional efficacy and comparable safety profiles to those identified with SGLT2i in actual clinical trials. Yoomin concluded her talk by stating that exploring the efficacy and safety of the proposed treatment using simulation experiments can help design an optimized clinical trial, which may increase the chance of success in the clinical trials. The talks by Mr. Lee and Yoomin were well received, and an active and interesting Q & A session was followed.

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. 

On December 5, 2019, CCADD had a 2^nd year-end workshop at the LAKAI Sandpine resort in Gangneung city. The workshop was not only attended by the existing CCADD members, but also by the prospective student Yoona Choi. The aims of the workshop were to overview, evaluate, and celebrate the achievements of year 2019, to set up new goals for 2020, and to build up team spirit among all the current and future lab members. The workshop included 9 presentations, the theme of which covered the milestone and future of CCADD, administration review, talent acquiring strategies, and educational and research activities.

After the workshop, Siun Kim, a 2^nd year Ph.D. student at CCADD, who happens to be a talented dancer taught a couple of basic choreograph. The song used for the dance cover was 'Let's Groove' by Earth, Wind & Fire. Although many were new to dancing, everyone truly enjoyed dancing. At first, many felt so awkward about their moves, but soon after, everyone moved to the music and enjoyed the session. 

You can also find how fun the workshop was!