Summary
Background
The burden of HCV cirrhosis is high and projected to increase significantly over the next decade. While interferon therapy is problematic in HCV cirrhosis, the era of direct‐acting ...anti‐viral (DAA) therapy provides effective treatment for patients with cirrhosis.
Aim
To systematically review the results of DAA therapy to date in patients with HCV cirrhosis, and highlight the ongoing challenges for DAA therapy in this population.
Methods
A structured Medline search was conducted to obtain phase II and III HCV trials in patients with cirrhosis. Citations from review articles were cross‐referenced and conference s from EASL and AASLD liver meetings for the preceding 3 years were reviewed manually. Keywords used included hepatitis C, cirrhosis and the DAA's: sofosbuvir, ledipasvir, velpatasvir, grazoprevir, elbasvir, daclatasvir, beclabuvir, asunaprevir, simeprevir, paritaprevir, ombitasvir and dasabuvir.
Results
Successful direct‐acting anti‐viral treatment is now possible in patients with HCV‐related cirrhosis including those with liver decompensation with several regimens now offering sustained virological response (SVR) of 90–95%. Overall success rates in GT1 cirrhosis are excellent while GT3‐infected patients with cirrhosis remain hard to cure. The pangenotypic combination of sofosbuvir and velpatasvir holds promise for GT3 cirrhosis achieving SVR of ~90%.
Conclusions
Potent DAA therapies provide much needed, safe and highly effective treatment options for persons with HCV cirrhosis including those previously deemed unsuitable for treatment. Combination therapy with two or more classes of drug is essential to achieve high efficacy and minimise viral resistance, with the role of ribavirin still under evaluation. However, several challenges remain including the hard‐to‐cure groups of GT3 cirrhosis and direct‐acting anti‐viral failures, and managing drug–drug interactions.
Despite the conceptual importance of contextuality in quantum mechanics, there is a hitherto limited number of applications requiring contextuality but not entanglement. Here, we show that for any ...quantum state and observables of sufficiently small dimensions producing contextuality, there exists a communication task with quantum advantage. Conversely, any quantum advantage in this task admits a proof of contextuality whenever an additional condition holds. We further show that given any set of observables allowing for quantum state-independent contextuality, there exists a class of communication tasks wherein the difference between classical and quantum communication complexities increases as the number of inputs grows. Finally, we show how to convert each of these communication tasks into a semi-device-independent protocol for quantum key distribution.
A
bstract
We introduce a new model of relativistic quantum analogue of the classical Otto engine in the presence of a perfectly reflecting boundary. A single qubit acts as the working substance ...interacting with a massless quantum scalar field, with the boundary obeying the Dirichlet condition. The quantum vacuum serves as a thermal bath through the Unruh effect. We observe that the response function of the qubit gets significantly modified by the presence of the reflecting boundary. From the structure of the correlation function, we find that three different cases emerge, namely, the intermediate boundary regime, the near boundary regime, and the far boundary regime. As expected, the correlation in the far boundary regime approaches that of the Unruh quantum Otto engine (UQOE) when the reflecting boundary goes to infinity. The effect of the reflecting boundary is manifested through the reduction of the critical excitation probability of the qubit and the work output of the engine. Inspite of the reduced work output, the efficiency of the engine remains unaltered even in the presence of the boundary.
We present experimental evidence that the room temperature thermal conductivity (kappa) of individual multiwalled carbon and boron-nitride nanotubes does not obey Fourier's empirical law of thermal ...conduction. Because of isotopic disorder, kappa's of carbon nanotubes and boron-nitride nanotubes show different length dependence behavior. Moreover, for these systems we find that Fourier's law is violated even when the phonon mean free path is much shorter than the sample length.
Solid-State Thermal Rectifier Chang, C. W.; Okawa, D.; Majumdar, A. ...
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
11/2006, Volume:
314, Issue:
5802
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
We demonstrated nanoscale solid-state thermal rectification. High-thermal-conductivity carbon and boron nitride nanotubes were mass-loaded externally and inhomogeneously with heavy molecules. The ...resulting nanoscale system yields asymmetric axial thermal conductance with greater heat flow in the direction of decreasing mass density. The effect cannot be explained by ordinary perturbative wave theories, and instead we suggest that solitons may be responsible for the phenomenon. Considering the important role of electrical rectifiers (diodes) in electronics, thermal rectifiers have substantial implications for diverse thermal management problems, ranging from nanoscale calorimeters to microelectronic processors to macroscopic refrigerators and energy-saving buildings.
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