David Frühbuß

My PhD is anchored on two complementary lines of work: a foundation model of the immune system, and a pipeline for mechanism and target discovery in complex disease. Project Line 1 investigates how to utilize data from different modalities and different diseases to model the human immune system, capture its interaction and role within diseases, and understand how it interacts with therapies, both existing and prospective. The immune system is at once our most powerful defense and, in many diseases, the decisive factor that turns pathology lethal. Its adaptive, tissue-spanning, multicellular nature resists intuition-precisely the kind of complexity where machine learning can transform understanding. The goal over the PhD is to build a version-one foundation model of the immune system that is multi-modal, multi-scale, and adaptable to individual patients. Such a model should support diverse tasks by providing immune context to downstream analyses, adapting to specific questions, and generating mechanistic insight. Project Line 2 builds a mechanism and target discovery pipeline for complex disease. Current pipelines rely on carefully sequenced, highly robust steps to accumulate evidence-reliable but narrow, often limited to moving from one modality or scale to the next and only lightly using machine learning. The aim is to develop multivariate, graph-based models that integrate across modalities and scales while preserving rigor and reliability, so this pipeline can run in parallel to existing practice and reveal insights that would otherwise remain hidden. Together, Immune 1 and the mechanism and target discovery pipeline aim to turn the complexity of immunity from an obstacle into a usable map for therapy design and selection.