Thermal neutron capture studies of 108 Ag and 110 Ag

Imperial Users onl

Safety and efficacy of combination therapy with low-dose gemcitabine, paclitaxel, and sorafenib in patients with cisplatin-resistant urothelial cancer

Various regimens including molecular targeted agents have been examined in patients with cisplatin (CDDP)-resistant urothelial cancer (UC). However, some studies have been stopped owing to the development of severe adverse events. The main aim of this study was to examine the anticancer effects, changes in the quality of life (QoL), and safety of combined therapy of low-dose gemcitabine, paclitaxel, and sorafenib (LD-GPS) in patients with CDDP-resistant UC. Twenty patients were treated with gemcitabine (700 mg/m2 on day 1), paclitaxel (70 mg/m2 on day 1), and sorafenib (400 mg/day on days 8?22). QoL and pain relief were evaluated using the short-form survey (SF)-36 for bodily pain and the visual analog scale (VAS). VAS scores were significantly decreased by both the second- and third-line therapies (P = 0.012 and 0.028, respectively). The bodily pain score from the SF-36 survey was also significantly (P = 0.012) decreased. Complete responses, partial responses, and stable disease were found in 0 (0.0 %), 1 (5.0 %), and 13 patients (65 %), respectively. The median (interquartile range) period of overall survival after starting of this therapy was 7 (5?11) months. Three patients (15.0 %) stopped therapy because of grade 3 fatigue and hand?foot reactions. LD-GPS therapy was well tolerated by patients with CDDP-resistant UC. QoL was maintained, and improvements in their pain levels were found after treatment; pain relief was detected after third-line therapy. We suggest that this treatment regimen is worthy of consideration as second- and third-line therapy for patients with CDDP-resistant UC

Towards a Classification of Non-interactive Computational Assumptions in Cyclic Groups

We study non-interactive computational intractability assumptions in prime-order cyclic groups. We focus on the broad class of computational assumptions which we call target assumptions where the adversary’s goal is to compute concrete group elements. Our analysis identifies two families of intractability assumptions, the q-Generalized Diffie-Hellman Exponent (q-GDHE) assumptions and the q-Simple Fractional (q-SFrac) assumptions (a natural generalization of the q-SDH assumption), that imply all other target assumptions. These two assumptions therefore serve as Uber assumptions that can underpin all the target assumptions where the adversary has to compute specific group elements. We also study the internal hierarchy among members of these two assumption families. We provide heuristic evidence that both families are necessary to cover the full class of target assumptions. We also prove that having (polynomially many times) access to an adversarial 1-GDHE oracle, which returns correct solutions with non-negligible probability, entails one to solve any instance of the Computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) assumption. This proves equivalence between the CDH and 1-GDHE assumptions. The latter result is of independent interest. We generalize our results to the bilinear group setting. For the base groups, our results translate nicely and a similar structure of non-interactive computational assumptions emerges. We also identify Uber assumptions in the target group but this requires replacing the q-GDHE assumption with a more complicated assumption, which we call the bilinar gap assumption. Our analysis can assist both cryptanalysts and cryptographers. For cryptanalysts, we propose the q-GDHE and the q-SDH assumptions are the most natural and important targets for cryptanalysis in prime-order groups. For cryptographers, we believe our classification can aid the choice of assumptions underpinning cryptographic schemes and be used as a guide to minimize the overall attack surface that different assumptions expose

Two-Sided Malicious Security for Private Intersection-Sum with Cardinality

Private intersection-sum with cardinality allows two parties, where each party holds a private set and one of the parties additionally holds a private integer value associated with each element in her set, to jointly compute the cardinality of the intersection of the two sets as well as the sum of the associated integer values for all the elements in the intersection, and nothing beyond that. We present a new construction for private intersection sum with cardinality that provides malicious security with abort and guarantees that both parties receive the output upon successful completion of the protocol. A central building block for our constructions is a primitive called shuffled distributed oblivious PRF (DOPRF), which is a PRF that offers oblivious evaluation using a secret key shared between two parties, and in addition to this allows obliviously permuting the PRF outputs of several parallel oblivious evaluations. We present the first construction for shuffled DOPRF with malicious security. We further present several new sigma proof protocols for relations across Pedersen commitments, ElGamal encryptions, and Camenisch-Shoup encryptions that we use in our main construction, for which we develop new batching techniques to reduce communication. We implement and evaluate the efficiency of our protocol and show that we can achieve communication cost that is only 4-5 times greater than the most efficient semi-honest protocol. When measuring monetary cost of executing the protocol in the cloud, our protocol is 25 times more expensive than the semi-honest protocol. Our construction also allows for different parameter regimes that enable trade-offs between communication and computation