Associate Professor Martin Stone is a researcher and teacher in the Monash University Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute. He received his BSc and MSc (Hons) degrees from the University of Auckland (New Zealand) and his PhD from the University of Cambridge (UK). He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Scripps Research Institute in (San Diego, USA) and a faculty member at Indiana University (Bloomington, USA) before moving to Monash in 2007. From 2013-2016 he served as Director of the Graduate Program in Biomedical Science at Monash.

Martin’s research program focuses on the biochemistry and pharmacology of chemokines and their receptors, which play critical roles in directing the migration of leukocytes in inflammatory responses. Recently, his lab has made important contributions to understanding the influence of post-translational tyrosine sulfation on chemokine receptor recognition and function and the structural basis by which chemokines can differentially activate a shared receptor to elicit distinct cellular outcomes.

Inflammation is the response of a tissue and its microvascular system to injury or infection. A hallmark of inflammation is the accumulation of leukocytes (white blood cells), which remove pathogens and necrotic tissue by phagocytosis and proteolytic degradation. However, excessive leukocyte recruitment or activity leads to the release of toxic substances and degradation of healthy tissue, i.e. inflammatory disease.
Leukocyte recruitment in inflammation is controlled by the expression and secretion of small proteins called chemokines at the site of inflammation and by the subsequent interaction of those chemokines with chemokine receptors located on the surfaces of circulating leukocytes. A detailed understanding of chemokine-receptor interactions is required in order to rationally develop novel therapeutic agents against inflammatory diseases. Our group is investigating several important aspects of chemokine and chemokine receptor biochemistry with the overall goals of better understanding and ultimately controlling their biological functions.