Building a More Resilient Future Through Respiratory Protection

During a health emergency, society will depend on critical infrastructure workers and emergency responders to remain protected, maintain essential operations, and address the threat at hand. Although the nature of the next emergency remains uncertain, preparing for it in advance is central to Blueprint Biosecurity’s work. That principle has shaped our evolving approach to PPE and its role in protecting critical workers and sustaining essential services from day zero.

In Blueprint Biosecurity’s early days, our leaders evaluated a range of promising technologies and approaches to determine where we could have the greatest impact. Our first area of focus was respiratory protection. Given the shortcomings exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, we evaluated what changes would be needed across systems, policies, and respirators themselves to address those gaps. While our research identified highly impactful and cost-effective approaches, including switching to reusable respirators whenever possible, critical workers also needed systems capable of manufacturing, stockpiling, distributing, and supporting the use of effective PPE during an emergency.

Published in 2024, the Blueprint for Pandemic PPE grew out of a need to better understand preparedness gaps. In 2020, demand for respirators surged, while manufacturing capacity and supply chains proved vulnerable and were quickly overwhelmed. Years later, those same challenges persist. As the threat landscape continues to evolve, the United States could once again face a health emergency without the capacity to adequately protect the workers society depends on most. Blueprint is now focused on identifying a path forward that ensures critical workers receive the level of protection they need when the next emergency occurs.

Evolving the PPE Strategy from Next-Generation Respirator to Policy Generation

The Blueprint for Pandemic PPE identified a range of opportunities to strengthen respiratory protection. Building on that foundation, we have shifted our attention to identifying which practical systems are needed to ensure respirators reach critical workers when they are needed most.

Three key pillars now guide our work:

• Advocating for stockpiling of respiratory protection across all levels of government 
• Strengthening domestic supply chains and surge manufacturing capacity for respiratory protection 
• Identifying and addressing barriers that prevent critical workers from successfully using respiratory PPE

Together, these priorities can strengthen preparedness, support economic continuity, and make it easier to distribute PPE when an emergency occurs. 

How Blueprint is Advancing Respiratory Protection Work 

Over the past two years, the PPE team has been hard at work building new relationships with academic researchers and other collaborators to understand key gaps in respiratory protection and effective use. 

Some of this work has included partnering with an engineering firm to establish a baseline understanding of how successfully untrained users without the support of a respiratory protection program are able to use respirators. Preliminary findings have shown that while many users can achieve and maintain a good fit over workdays, fit testing and training are critical to achieve good fit across populations of users. These findings and more will be presented at the upcoming ISRP 2026 conference in October. 

Additionally, we have announced our grantees for the Filtration Loss Testing in Respirator Equipment Research (FILTER) program. This initiative will evaluate how and why respirator filter materials lose filtration efficiency over time and under real-world use conditions. The findings from these projects could help emergency planners, healthcare systems, manufacturers, and critical workers better understand when respirators can continue to be used safely and when they should be replaced. While this initiative can help address key questions around respirator reuse, important gaps remain. Additional research requests for proposals are in development to evaluate other key gaps in preparedness should another emergency arise. 

Building Capacity and Impact

Blueprint Biosecurity continues to evolve alongside a changing threat landscape. To date, we have been awarded $95 million to accelerate key elements of our mission, with additional investments still needed to fully realize our vision for PPE.

As this work expands, Blueprint is also growing the team needed to carry it forward. This summer, we’re seeking two mission-driven program officers who are interested in helping advance our PPE portfolio and translate ambitious ideas into meaningful impact. Both hires will have substantial ownership over what problems we pursue and how we pursue them: 

• Research Management. We’re looking for someone whose whole job is to identify the most pressing questions surrounding respiratory protection and find the right groups to help us answer them. Respiratory protection might feel established, but we encounter unanswered questions every day. For instance, how long can a respirator be reused before it begins to lose protection? And how large is the gap in manufacturing capacity during a pandemic? These are the types of questions that we’d like this person to help think through.
• Grant Evaluation. We’re looking for someone to help scale our grantmaking. In the next year, we expect to move at least $10 million in PPE grants to support the vision of the PPE workstream. PPE needs don’t always map cleanly to a research question, so this person will need to think creatively in identifying new paths and evaluating the impact that would come from them.

If this sounds like a good fit for you, apply here by August 21, 2026. Those who are interested in Blueprint’s mission but do not see the right current opening are also encouraged to submit an expression of interest.