Preface

The public health care burden of hepatitis C virus infection remains significant despite the remarkable progress in HCV therapeutics during the last decade, as around 58 million people are currently having the virus and almost 4,00,000 deaths are reported annually due to hepatitis C-induced hepatocellular carcinoma. The advent and approval of a dozen oral interferon-free direct-acting antivirals have revolutionized the treatment paradigms for hepatitis C infection while achieving higher sustained virologic response rates (>95%) in treated individuals. Analogously, HCV and host interactions to map networks in disease progression, extrahepatic manifestations, and virus invasion strategies to the host immune system are still enigmatic to fully understand. Albeit, ample understanding of HCV life cycle in vitro and transient in vivo replication models, provide valuable insights towards the viral entry, genome replication, virion formation, and host infection involving a highly orchestrated series of molecular and cellular events, including a plethora of genes and cell signaling cascades. However, questions remain to answers regarding the virus clearance without any therapeutic intervention in some HCV-infected populations, molecular pathogenesis of infection transforming the acute hepatitis C infection to end-stage liver disease, post-viral eradication, hepatocellular carcinoma, and the fate of the immune system once the virus eliminates from the body.

This book intends to provide insights into what has been achieved in HCV infection biology, virus-host interactions, molecular epidemiology of the infection, and the full spectrum of immune responses to hepatitis C, either the involvement of innate or adaptive immune responses in the first three chapters. The following chapters 4 and 5 comprehensively illustrate the simplified HCV diagnostic solutions, predictive barriers, and future perspectives for general, as well as vulnerable HCV infected populations, along with the up-to-date procedural and protocol guidelines for HCV diagnosis. Book Chapter 4 also highlights the strides toward a better understanding of HCV screening and diagnostic strategies for high throughput anti-HCV screening and diagnosis, applications for risk prediction tools, and cost-effective analysis of current diagnostic in the hepatitis C cascade of care. The next four book chapters (from chapters 6 to 9) precisely and comprehensively illustrate the current landscape of HCV treatment, their administration, consensus treatment guidelines for their recommendations, and their real-world treat outcomes. These book chapters also provide the probable answers to some fundamental questions like why some HCV-infected populations are nonresponsive to IFN-free DAAs, the phenomena behind viral relapse, and reasons behind treatment failure in harder-to-treat specific HCV subpopulations. Within those book chapters, chapter 9 also emphasizes real-world challenges in HCV therapeutics to unleash certain barriers while making it possible to expand the scale of therapy, and the cascade of care, and bridge existing gaps in hepatitis C care between developed and poor nations. Chapter 10 of the book overviews the emerging anti-HCV treatment strategies in the pipeline and explains the efforts to do while refocusing on anti-mRNA-based treatment strategies and nanomedicine-based approaches used in conjunction with DAAs for hepatitis C. The book chapter also portrays some glimpses into the future for the design of controlled animal and human HCV infection models for the design of an appropriate but effective prophylactic or protective anti-hepatitis C vaccine model. The last two book chapters (chapters 11 and 12) discuss the goals, policy implementation, and progress of the Global Health Sector Strategies (GHSS) 2016-2021 on HCV worldwide in the last decade as well as the cross-cutting barriers to break and actions to be taken in this decade while achieving the global goal of HCV elimination by 2030. The final chapter of the book also describes the strategies to opt at hospitals, community services centers, health care service providers, and government levels to prevent new HCV incidences and reduce HCV-related morbidities and mortalities with concrete efforts, collective will, and public health notes to galvanize the efforts to eradicate this epidemic worldwide by 2030.

Overall, this well-written book provides from simple, accessible introduction to a complex hepatology field, and in-depth information about HCV basics, clinical diagnostics, and therapeutic knowledge to all stakeholders involved in HCV screening, diagnosis, treatment, and management. Without being exhaustive or redundant, it can be easily accessed to concepts by extensive cross-referenced studies. We hope that this book will enhance the knowledge of a common reader about hepatitis C infection, its diagnosis, and treatment, and provide answers to the physicians, clinicians, hepatologists, infectious disease experts, health care providers, and investigators to some of the outstanding problems in the ever-changing field of hepatitis C research.

Declared none.