A student and staff collaborative audit exploring the food and drinks available from a dental teaching hospital outlet.

Introduction NHS England's Commissioning for Quality and Innovation (CQUIN) standard 1b sets targets for food and drinks high in fat, sugar or salt (HFSS) that should be sold in hospitals.Aims To assess the products that were available in a dental hospital food outlet and to explore the cost and placement of HFSS products.Design and setting A prospective audit of the food outlet in a dental hospital in London, UK carried out by staff and students in May 2018 benchmarked against CQUIN 1b.Materials and methods Staff and students collected data on food and drinks that were available over a two-week period.Results Only cold and hot drinks met the CQUIN target that 80% of drinks should contain less than five grams of sugar/100 ml. A third of packaged biscuits and 50% of cakes and pastries contained more than 250 kcal per portion. HFSS products were visible in front of customers at the checkout till. Packaged fruits were more expensive than packaged biscuits.Discussion and conclusion This audit showed inconsistencies between the food and drinks available for staff, students and patients at a dental hospital and the healthy eating messages that staff and students relay to support patients' oral health.

Tumor regression following intravenous administration of lactoferrin- and lactoferricin-bearing dendriplexes.

The possibility of using gene therapy for the treatment of cancer is limited by the lack of safe, intravenously administered delivery systems able to selectively deliver therapeutic genes to tumors. In this study, we investigated if the conjugation of the polypropylenimine dendrimer to lactoferrin and lactoferricin, whose receptors are overexpressed on cancer cells, could result in a selective gene delivery to tumors and a subsequently enhanced therapeutic efficacy. The conjugation of lactoferrin and lactoferricin to the dendrimer significantly increased the gene expression in the tumor while decreasing the non-specific gene expression in the liver. Consequently, the intravenous administration of the targeted dendriplexes encoding TNFα led to the complete suppression of 60% of A431 tumors and up to 50% of B16-F10 tumors over one month. The treatment was well tolerated by the animals. These results suggest that these novel lactoferrin- and lactoferricin-bearing dendrimers are promising gene delivery systems for cancer therapy. FROM THE CLINICAL EDITOR: Specific targeting of cancer cells should enhance the delivery of chemotherapeutic agents. This is especially true for gene delivery. In this article, the authors utilized a dendrimer-based system and conjugated this with lactoferrin and lactoferricin to deliver anti-tumor genes. The positive findings in animal studies should provide the basis for further clinical studies.