Public R&D Projects-Based Investment and Collaboration Framework for an Overarching South Korean National Strategy of Personalized Medicine

Abstract

Since the South Korean government designated personalized medicine (PM) as a national strategic task in 2016, it has spared no investment to achieve its goals, which were recently accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This study analyzed investment trends in 17 regions and eight technology clusters related to PM, consisting of 5727 public R&D projects worth USD 148.5 million, from 2015 to 2020. We also illustrated the level of investment for different PM-related technology clusters in each region; various research organizations explicitly verified comparable innovation capabilities for all eight technology fields in 17 regions, showing individual differences in technology areas per region. Our framework provided information to allow implementation of two goals: administering successful PM and improving regional equality in public health and healthcare according to technical and organizational levels. This study empirically demonstrates that it can provide a precise overarching innovation scheme with regional, technical, and organizational dimensions to establish collaboration among different stakeholders, thereby creating a foundation for an overarching national PM strategy.

National Investment Framework for Revitalizing the R&D Collaborative Ecosystem of Sustainable Smart Agriculture

“…The target research area should be divided into small areas, and the status and trends of the sub-research areas must be examined to establish a collaboration ecosystem and R&D investment framework for smart agriculture in Korea. As noted in prior studies [60][61][62], this procedure is fundamental to ensuring enhanced stakeholder collaboration by reducing information uncertainty on the knowledge status in various target fields, thereby improving the quality of decision-making on national R&D. Therefore, this study presents timely, comprehensive, and useful information on the state of R&D activities in the smart agricultural sector in 17 regions of Korea using the proposed framework. The main research questions (RQs) are as follows:…”

“…Further, to understand the characteristics of studies that correspond to the nationally funded research projects, this study adopted the All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) four digits of Scopus to develop the classification model that used the author keywords of approximately 1 million articles (i.e., features) and the ASJC codes assigned to each paper (i.e., labels). Thereafter, three ASJC codes and their probabilities were assigned to each nationally-funded research project calculated by the ASJC classification model [60][61][62]. The probability was determined based on the titles and abstracts of the projects.…”

“…Further, a 25% threshold probability was set to identify more similar projects (clusters). Figure 3 presents a conceptual diagram of this process [60][61][62].…”

“…The study identified smart-agriculture research areas via the co-occurrence matrix and investigated the relationship between ASJC codes by understanding the network structure visualized by the VOSViewer (Version 1.6.18, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands) [60][61][62][63][64][65]. The number of clusters ranged from 1 (γ = 0.1) to 9 (γ = 2.0) by adjusting a resolution parameter (γ).…”

Influencing Factors and Symbiotic Mechanism of the Integration of Medical and Disease Prevention during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Cross-Sectional Survey of Public Hospital Employees

“…The main reason is that starting from 2021, the Zhejiang provincial government required that medical institutions above the second level must set up a public health department. The public health department received government funding in health resources and systematically trained public health department employees [28]. Since administrators were responsible for public health training in public hospitals, their knowledge of symbiotic unit, environment, and models were also higher than did clinicians [29].…”