Sicorello M. Health + Life Science Alliance Heidelberg Mannheim MWK32-7531-32/10/4: HAIRS: Hair-based Assessment of Individual Responses to Stress. 09/2026-08/2027.
HAIRS aims to develop a novel hair-based proteomic assay for the standardized quantification of biological chronic stress burden. Current non-invasive stress biomarkers are dominated by saliva- or blood-based measures with high short-term fluctuation, or by single-analyte hair markers such as hair cortisol, which show limited predictive value.
HAIRS builds on our proof-of-principle work showing that proteomic machine learning signatures can substantially outperform hair cortisol in stress-associated mental health
research.