Pulling the hairs: Investigating the hair metabolome as a promising approach to characterize the progression of chronic alcoholic liver diseases (METABOLHAIR)

Alcoholic liver disease (ALD) is the most prevalent type of chronic liver disease. Despite the high prevalence of ALD, diagnosis and disease staging are still missing sensitive and specific biomarkers. As a result, most patients are diagnosed only at an advanced stage, leading to frequent hospitalization, increased medication use and liver transplantations, a high-burden option for patients and health-care systems. This PhD project (METABOLHAIR) aims to explore the applicability of human hair as a new diagnostic matrix in metabolomics to identify and detect early-stage biomarkers of chronic ALD. This project strives to elucidate the global hair metabolome composition, its inter-individual variations and possible influencing parameters. Identification of ALD biomarkers will be performed using an advanced metabolomics workflow, including a unique analytical platform (two-dimensional liquid chromatography-ion mobility spectrometry-quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry). Furthermore, the applicability of the biomarkers in segmental hair analysis to predict disease progression and diagnose the different stages (alcoholic fatty liver disease and alcoholic steatohepatitis) of ALD will be investigated. The METABOLHAIR project will help improve the current knowledge on the hair metabolome and can be used to screen individuals with alcohol use disorders for ALD to prevent the development of end-stage liver diseases.

Keywords:METABOLOMICS, HAIR

Disciplines:Medical metabolomics, Biomarker discovery, Analytical toxicology, Clinical toxicology