Maximilian Görlitz
Joint mentorship with Sofya Lebedeva
Projects
Research Direction: Airway Infection Blockers: Literature Review and Strategic Evaluation
Conduct literature reviews on drug-free airway infection blockers (AIBs), including nasal sprays and inhalables that may capture or inactivate pathogens at the respiratory tract mucosa.
Note that AIBs is a term that we came up with and is not widely used. All of our project ideas revolve around this area. We have many open questions and your exact research direction would depend on your interests and strengths.
Evaluate the quality, reproducibility, and limitations of existing clinical and pre-clinical evidence on AIBs.
Review how AIBs might complement respiratory PPE based on the aerosol science of particle deposition, filtration efficiency for different particle sizes, and PPE usage patterns.
Help us develop an ambitious but feasible target product profile for AIBs and evaluate candidate products against this TPP (e.g. efficacy, duration of protection, manufacturability, scalability, and cost).
Identify key evidence gaps and prioritise which uncertainties should be resolved first. Help us design what pre-clinical and clinical experiments should be done to provide key missing evidence.
Produce strategic memos and landscape analyses to inform future R&D and field-building efforts in technical biosecurity.
Help develop staged research plans and stopping criteria for future experimental work. How can we model when to stop pursuing research on AIBs? What evidence would convince us that AIBs aren’t worth putting further resources into compared to other biosecurity interventions?
What I'm looking for in a Mentee
We’re looking for mentees who are intellectually curious, self-directed, and comfortable working through ambiguous or incomplete evidence. Some background in biomedical sciences, biosecurity, public health, economics, or related fields is a plus, but strong reasoning and research skills matter more than specific credentials.
This project is a particularly good fit for people who have a knack for wading through dense or boring documents, extracting the important information, and turning it into clear strategic conclusions. A strong fit is someone who enjoys independently chasing down answers, notices important details others miss, has healthy skepticism, and is comfortable changing their mind when the evidence changes.
What I'm like as a Mentor
We’ll set clear goals, provide research direction, and have regular check-ins focused on prioritisation and feedback. We aim to give fellows substantial autonomy and expect them to be self-driven, proactive, and comfortable bringing new ideas or directions to the table. We expect that you reach out quickly when you get stuck instead of waiting one week for our next check-in.
The fellowship will involve close collaboration on literature review, strategic analysis, and research synthesis.
Bio
We are currently evaluating drug-free airway infection blockers (AIBs) as potential broad-spectrum countermeasures against respiratory pathogens. These interventions may offer a pathogen-agnostic complement to respiratory PPE in outbreak or biological attack scenarios by reducing infection risk at the level of the respiratory tract mucosa.
Sofya’s background spans bioinformatics, immunology, and founding technical research initiatives, and she is currently a PhD candidate at Oxford. Max currently works at Blueprint Biosecurity, and previously worked at the European Commission DG HERA and SecureBio. He’s an ELBI fellow and studied medicine and genomics in Munich and Oxford.
Our current work focuses on assessing the evidence base for AIBs, identifying key uncertainties, and evaluating whether this is a tractable and high-impact biosecurity intervention.
