UC San Francisco’s School of Dentistry is celebrating the holidays with what officials call one of the largest grants in its history: $24.4 million over seven years from the National Institutes of Health, twice as much as the original NIH award that funded earlier work at UCSF.
The grant, funded by the federal agency’s National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, will be used to address socio-economic and cultural disparities in oral health, UCSF said last week, and allow its Center to Address Disparities in Children’s Oral Health (nicknamed “CAN DO”) to launch new programs to prevent early childhood tooth decay.
That will include studying methods to prevent tooth decay in children, and working to integrate current scientific thinking on the topic into a variety of primary care and social service settings.
Officials said NIH also tapped UCSF to coordinate data for three funded research centers: UCSF, Boston University and the University of Colorado at Denver.
Each center will do two randomized clinical trials; all are focused on preventing early childhood tooth decay in various vulnerable, high-risk populations. Tooth decay, also known as dental caries, “is the most common chronic disease among children and it is becoming more prevalent nationwide, disproportionately among children in low-income families and certain minority groups,” John Featherstone, Ph.D., dean of UCSF’s School of Dentistry, said in a statement. Tooth decay is one of the most prevalent health conditions in the country, according to the NIH. The 1999-2004 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey by the federal Centers for Disease Control indicated that 42 percent of Mexican American children and 32 percent of black children ages 2-5 having decayed or filled teeth, compared with just 24 percent of white children.
The new programs at UCSF, Boston University and the University of Colorado, Denver, will assess the best ways to reach susceptible young children and their caregivers to prevent the disease and reduce oral health disparities. Early childhood caries is particularly devastating because general anesthesia is often required for treatment, which makes it an expensive and traumatic condition to treat, according to Jane Weintraub, DDS, who serves as professor and chair of UCSF’s Division of Oral Epidemiology and Dental Public Health, as well as the principal investigator for the CAN DO Center. She said one- and two-year-old children typically can’t sit still in a dentist’s chair, so they need to be treated in operating rooms under anesthesia, where the tab could approach $5,000 at UCSF five years ago, not including the dental part of the procedure.
Relatively easy, low-cost strategies, such as coating children’s teeth with a fluoride varnish for less than $1 per application, can prevent teeth from decaying in the first place. And low-cost prevention can be provided by primary care doctors or hygienists, with proper training, and can prevent related conditions, such decay-related toothaches and difficulty eating, sleeping and speaking — all of which sounds like a good tradeoff to Weintraub.
Hither & yon
Estech gets $11.2M in funding, other news
Endoscopic Technologies Inc., also known as ESTECH, a San Ramon-based maker of cardiac surgery devices, says it closed on an $11.2 million equity financing in September, the first tranche of a planned $20 million investment led by Saints Capital Everest, along with existing investors Telegraph Hill Partners and Waveland Venture Partners. The company also said it’s appointed John Pavlidis as president and CEO and Terry Kinninger as CFO and chief operating officer. Pavlidis previously was president and CEO at R2 Technology Inc.; Saints Capital Everest recently acquired Boston Scientific’s investments in a number of companies, including ESTECH.
Scott Halsted, Saints’ managing director, said it’s “particularly pleased” with the new personnel moves.