Duhyeong Lee was a student researcher at the Center for Convergenece Approaches in Drug Development (CCADD) at the Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology, Seoul National University. Currently a mathematics and statistics double-major student at the Departments of Mathematics and Statistics, Korea University, Duhyeong joined CCADD through the 2021 Winter Internship program.

CCADD congratulates Dr. Kyeong-Ryoon Lee's appointment as Visiting Associate Professor at the Department of Molecular Medicine and Biopharmaceutical Sciences (MMBS). The news of Dr. Kyeong-Ryoon Lee's promotion came out on January 26^th, and his new appointment will take effect on March 1^st, 2021.

Dr. Kyeong-Ryoon Lee received his Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Science at College of Pharmacy, Seoul National University. His research area includes pharmacokinetics, drug metabolism, transporters, and modeling and simulation. Furthermore, Dr. Lee's expertise in artificial intelligence-based modeling, which can be implemented throughout the preclinical and clinical stages of the drug discovery process, has earned him the current position as a research scientist at Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology (KRIBB). 

Dr. Lee's appointment was actually the renewal of his visiting professorship. Dr. Kyeong-Ryoon Lee first joined CCADD on February 2018 as Adjunct Assistant Professor. Since then, Dr. Lee has contributed to CCADD a lot, being a valuable asset for CCADD, not only in research, but in mentoring graduate students.

Once again, CCADD congratulates Dr. Kyeong-Ryoon Lee on his achievement as he is plotting a new path to explore an untapped terrain. CCADD also hopes that Dr. Lee's promotion boosts synergy between CCADD and him. 

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. Lee was invited to the 6^th Gaucher Regional Forum -virtual edition, where he talked about the biosimilarity in the orphan world, particularly in the drug development for Gaucher disease. Prof. Lee also moderated the session. A year ago, Prof. Lee joined the 5^th of its kind, held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. 

The Forum entailed a series of dynamic and exciting discussion around the diagnosis, patient management and the safety and well-being of patients with Gaucher Disease. In his speech, Prof. Lee contrasted the differences between small molecule drugs and biologics, and how these differences could translate into something every clinician has to understand when she prescribes a biosimilar to her patients. Prof. Lee went further to explain why intended copies are not true biosimilars although almost all of them have been promoted and marketed as they were. For example, Abcertin by ISU ABXIS is not a true biosimilar to its reference biologic, which is imiglucerase by Genzyme®. Knowing the difference between true biosimilars and intended copies is very important not only for every practicing physician, patient, but for regulators to ensure each patient gets a biologic of high quality, which underwent the regulatory review and scrutiny.