Improved Diagnostics Through Understanding Living Systems Rethinking Biomarker Discovery

Chapter 1 – Biomarkers and Their Discovery Chapter 2 – What is Life? Chapter 3 – Life: Diversification, Organisation, and Emergence Chapter 4 – Representation of Living Systems Chapter 5 – Lexicon of Complexity: Twelve Hallmarks Chapter 6 – The Dynamics of Life: Cellular Automata, Nonlinear Behaviors, and Chaos Theory Chapter 7 – Beyond the Classical Conception of Biological Systems Chapter 8 – What Drives the Dynamics of Biological Systems? Chapter 9 – The Uniqueness of Individuals: Mosaicism, Chimerism, and the Mircobiome Chapter 10 – What are Diseases? Chapter 11 – How Unique is a Patient’s Disease? Information Classification: General Chapter 12 – A New Diagnostic Strategy for Biomarker Discovery Chapter 13 – Conclusion

Biography

Bertrand Rochat obtained his PhD in Science in 1997 at the laboratory of the psychiatric hospital in Cery, near Lausanne, Switzerland. He pursued postdoctoral positions in France, the United States, Scotland, and Switzerland, before becoming a laboratory head at Novartis Pharma in Switzerland. In 2003, he joined the University Hospital of Lausanne (CHUV) to set up and manage the Mass Spectrometry Facility. He assisted medical doctors and biologists with their research and, in parallel, developed his own. He became a specialist in the quantitative determination of drugs and native peptides by liquid chromatography□mass spectrometry (LC-MS) in biological matrices; in intratumoral drug metabolism and disposition; in global and untargeted analyses in patient plasma samples; and in routine qualitative and quantitative analysis using LC-high-resolution MS instruments. He has published more than 60 original articles, editorials, book chapters, and reviews in these fields. With advancements in LC-high-resolution MS technology, he was among the first experts to promote its use for routine analyses in clinical laboratories. As a bioanalyst working with these instruments, he realized that a paradigm shift in quantitative bioanalysis was inevitable. Faced with pervasive conservatism, he decided to write this book to more actively push for that shift. Importantly, this change is not only based on technical progress but also reflects our current understanding of what life is and what diseases are. He sees it as a moral imperative for patient care, especially given the reality of misdiagnoses and diagnostic odysseys.