The research team at Ewha Medical Center in Seoul, South Korea, announced on the 21st that it has recently been selected for the "2026 Korea-U.S. Innovation Achievement Research and Development Support Project" organized by the South Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare. The team will collaborate with U.S. research institutions to develop an AI-based radiopharmaceutical therapy platform aimed at exploring new treatment strategies for solid tumors that respond poorly to conventional therapies.

The team is composed of professors from Ewha Medical Center in Seoul, including Myeong Seung-jae (Gastroenterology), Oh Seung-jun (Nuclear Medicine), Ryu Chang-hoon (Oncology), Jeong Byeong-gwan (Pathology), and Son Byung-ho (Breast Surgery). The project will integrate large-scale clinical and pathological data from Ewha Medical Center, artificial intelligence digital pathology analysis technology from Emory University, and the pathological and clinical research capabilities of Case Western Reserve University and University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, to establish a precision medicine system covering drug development, patient screening, and treatment response prediction.

The research focuses on solid tumors such as gastric cancer, colorectal cancer, pancreatic cancer, and breast cancer. These tumors often possess a complex tumor microenvironment, including cancer cells, fibroblasts, immune cells, and blood vessels. In particular, in tumor microenvironments with significant fibrosis, therapeutic drugs have greater difficulty reaching cancer cells effectively, leading to increased treatment resistance and limited clinical options.

The project will advance along two primary technical pathways. The first is the complex targeted radiotherapy technology C-TRACER, which aims to develop radiopharmaceutical therapy capable of simultaneously targeting cancer cells and the tumor microenvironment. The second is the companion diagnostic technology CATCH, which uses AI to analyze multi-source patient data—including digital pathology images and spatial omics data—to screen patients suitable for treatment and predict their treatment responses.

Regarding therapeutic targets, the combined targeted radiotherapy technology will focus on CLDN18.2 protein, which is primarily expressed in cancer cells, and LRRC15, which is upregulated in the tumor microenvironment. LRRC15 is associated with cancer-associated fibroblasts and other components surrounding the tumor. The research team plans to develop radiopharmaceutical therapy candidates based on these targets using therapeutic radioisotopes and to validate their tumor-targeting efficacy, therapeutic effects, and safety.

The companion diagnostic technology will integrate digital pathology images, spatial omics data for verifying the localized distribution of genes and proteins within tumor tissue, patient clinical information, and preclinical treatment results to perform quantitative analysis of tumor target expression and tumor microenvironment characteristics, thereby developing patient screening and treatment response prediction methods.

It is reported that this research aims to improve clinical development efficiency and reduce R&D risks by linking radiopharmaceutical development with AI-driven patient stratification and early treatment response prediction. Professor Myeong Seung-jae serves as the principal investigator of the project, with Korean companies including Dongwha Aptis, Geninus, and Edith Biotech participating in the research.

Myeong Seung-jae stated that the distinguishing feature of this research lies not only in developing new radiopharmaceuticals but also in leveraging AI to predict which patients are most likely to benefit from treatment. The research team hopes to provide new treatment opportunities for solid tumor patients with limited therapeutic options by combining novel therapies that target both cancer cells and the tumor microenvironment with more precise patient screening technologies.

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