Cost-effectiveness of the ONCORAL multidisciplinary programme for the management of outpatients taking oral anticancer agents at risk of drug-related event: protocol for a pragmatic randomised controlled study.

Introduction: The development of oral anticancer agents (OAA) has profoundly changed cancer care, leading patients to manage their chemotherapy treatment on an outpatient basis. The prevention of iatrogenic effects of OAA remains a major concern, especially since their side effects are not less serious than those of intravenous chemotherapy. The ONCORAL programme was set up to secure the management of OAA in cancer patients followed at the Lyon University Hospital.

[Methodology to develop a virtual reality training for good practices in the preparation of anti-cancer drugs].

Objective: Describe the process for designing and creating SimUPAC 360°, a virtual reality training in anti-cancer drug production units.

Methods: A multi-centre (a University Hospital, a General Hospital and a Cancer Control Centre), inter-professional (pharmacists, hospital pharmacy technicians and health executives) working group has been set up. It was based on videoconferencing and online document sharing.

An approach to minimise dog use in regulatory toxicology: production of a best practice guide to study design.

The primary non-rodent species used in toxicology is the dog. It is generally agreed that, for ethical reasons, dog use should be reduced to the minimum consistent with maintaining the scientific quality of toxicology studies and ensuring human safety. Dog use in toxicology has been discussed widely, both from a scientific and ethical viewpoint, and there appears to be real potential for achieving significant reductions in the number of dogs used in pharmaceutical safety testing.

Preclinical safety evaluation using nonrodent species: an industry/welfare project to minimize dog use.

This review of the dog, the primary nonrodent species used in toxicology, and its use in the safety evaluation of pharmaceuticals, provides data on the number used in particular projects in an effort to establish a baseline from which some minimization can be measured. Opportunities for reduction and replacement, as identified by a European Industry/Welfare Steering Group, are discussed. The three distinct areas of potential approaches to minimize dog use are categorized as industrial cooperation/data sharing, achieving best practice in study design, and assessing the need for a particular study.

Ultrasound in carbohydrate chemistry: sonophysical glucose oligomerisation and sonocatalysed sucrose oxidation.

Both aspects of the interest in using ultrasound are illustrated by our results in the field of carbohydrate chemistry. The course of the heterogeneous reaction of glucose with hydrophobic alcohols in acidic medium is directed towards the oligomerisation of glucose because of the wetting of the glucose suspension due to the efficiency of the sonophysical mixing. On the other hand, a sonocatalysis is observed during the course of the oxidation of primary hydroxyl groups in homogeneous aqueous medium by the NaOCl/TEMPO system.