Each year Korea's Ministry of Health and Welfare and the Korea Health Industry Development Institute select 30 research achievements as the country's most outstanding in health R&D. In the 2026 round, announced in July, three of the thirty came from Yonsei University College of Medicine, a concentration that says something about the breadth of the medical school's research output.
Psychiatrist Cheon Keun-ah was recognised for AI-based digital diagnostic support for early autism screening, published in npj Digital Medicine. Her team's models work from home-recorded behavioural videos, voice data and parent questionnaires, with one multimodal model combining voice and survey data and another analysing parent-child interaction footage, so that risk can be estimated from data collected on a smartphone rather than in a clinic.
Pharmacologist Kim Hyong-bum was honoured for a large-scale functional map of cancer-associated variants of the ATM gene, published in Cell in 2025. His team introduced about 23,000 single-nucleotide variants into human cells to test their effects and built DeepATM, a deep learning model that predicts the consequences of variants not yet characterised. Otorhinolaryngologist Rha Min-seok completed the trio with noninvasive nasal-secretion biomarkers for diagnosing type 2 chronic rhinosinusitis, published in Allergy in 2025, allowing disease subtypes to be distinguished from nasal mucus rather than invasive sampling.