Dr Gavin Fullstone
Biography
I completed my degree in Medical Genetics at the University of Sheffield in 2010, before going on to complete an interdisciplinary masters in Biomedicine at the University of Sheffield. Thereafter, I completed my PhD at the University College London in computational modelling of nanoparticle transport across the blood-brain barrier. Thereafter, I enjoyed a successful post-doc (2016-2025) at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, working on computational modelling of apoptosis signalling and development of antibody-based CNS-targeted therapeutics. In 2025, I joined the University of Portsmouth as a Lecturer in Pharmacology.
Research interests
The basic concept underlying my research work is to recapitulate biological and disease systems/processes in computational models. I apply these models to better understand how the biological systems work (what if scenarios) and predict how they will interact with specific therapeutics or combinations of therapeutics. This encompasses new expanding areas of pharmacology including model-informed drug development (MIDD), systems medicine and quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP). Specifically, I specialise in applying GPU-accelerated particle-based modelling to better capture spatial aspects of biological systems (1,2,3).
I have two key areas of specific biological interest, cancer and neurological diseases building on my experience in regulated cell death signalling (apoptosis) (1,4) and approaches to enable delivery of therapeutics across the blood-brain barrier into the central nervous system (CNS) (5,6).
Research outputs
2025
A pH-sensitive binding modality allows successful transferrin receptor-mediated transcytosis of a bivalent antibody across brain barriers
Kuhn, P., Petralla, S., Dabbagh, F., Pegoretti, V., Muranyi, W., Ishikawa, H., Schroten, H., Fischer, R., Frenzel, A., Schirrmann, T., Rehm, M., Schwerk, C., Fricker, G., Kontermann, R., Fullstone, G.
22 Sep 2025, In: mAbs. 17, 1, 16p., 2563758
Research output: Article
2023
Rapid particle-based simulations of cellular signalling with the FLAME-Accelerated Signalling Tool (FaST) and GPUs
Fullstone, G.
20 Apr 2023,
Research output: Chapter (peer-reviewed)
2021
Low-level endothelial TRAIL-receptor expression obstructs the CNS-delivery of angiopep-2 functionalised TRAIL-receptor agonists for the treatment of glioblastoma
Moorthy, N. K., Seifert, O., Eisler, S., Weirich, S., Kontermann, R. E., Rehm, M., Fullstone, G.
14 Dec 2021, In: Molecules. 26, 24, 22p., 7582
Research output: Article
Marizomib sensitizes primary glioma cells to apoptosis induced by a latest-generation TRAIL receptor agonist
Boccellato, C., Kolbe, E., Peters, N., Juric, V., Fullstone, G., Verreault, M., Idbaih, A., Lamfers, M. L. M., Murphy, B. M., Rehm, M.
24 Jun 2021, In: Cell Death & Disease, 11p., 647
Research output: Article
2020
On the shuttling across the blood-brain barrier via tubule formation: Mechanism and cargo avidity bias
Tian, X., Leite, D. M., Scarpa, E., Nyberg, S., Fullstone, G., Forth, J., Matias, D., Apriceno, A., Poma, A., Duro-Castano, A., Vuyyuru, M., Harker-Kirschneck, L., Šarić, A., Zhang, Z., Xiang, P., Fang, B.,
27 Nov 2020, In: Science Advances. 6, 48, p. 1-15, 15p., eabc4397
Research output: Article
Stress-induced TRAILR2 expression overcomes TRAIL resistance in cancer cell spheroids
Stöhr, D., Schmid, J. O., Beigl, T. B., Mack, A., Maichl, D. S., Cao, K., Budai, B., Fullstone, G., Kontermann, R. E., Mürdter, T. E., Tait, S. W. G., Hagenlocher, C., Pollak, N., Scheurich, P., Rehm, M.
1 Nov 2020, In: Cell Death & Differentiation. 27, 16p.
Research output: Article
The apoptosome molecular timer synergises with XIAP to suppress apoptosis execution and contributes to prognosticating survival in colorectal cancer
Fullstone, G., Bauer, T. L., Guttà, C., Salvucci, M., Prehn, J. H. M., Rehm, M.
1 Oct 2020, In: Cell Death and Differentiation. 27, 15p.
Research output: Article
The FLAME-accelerated signalling tool (FaST) for facile parallelisation of flexible agent-based models of cell signalling
Fullstone, G., Guttà, C., Beyer, A., Rehm, M.
20 Apr 2020, In: npj Systems Biology and Applications. 6, 10p., 10
Research output: Article