Alessio Ciulli

Alessio Ciulli holds the Personal Chair of Chemical Structural Biology at the University of Dundee's School of Life Sciences. He is also the Founder and Director of the newly announced Dundee’s Centre for Targeted Protein Degradation (CeTPD). Dr. Ciulli is the scientific founder of Amphista therapeutics, a company that develops new protein degradation platforms. He has received numerous awards and honours, amongst which are the EFMC Prize for Young Medicinal Chemist in Academia, the RSC Capps Green Zomaya Award in medicinal computational chemistry, and recently the 2022 Prous Institute - Overton and Meyer Award for New Technologies in Drug Discovery. The Ciulli Laboratory develops novel small molecules inducing targeted protein degradation and modulating protein-protein interactions. Dr Ciulli's research is on fundamental chemical biology and translate it via collaboration partnership with the biopharma industry and by creation of spin-out companies. The Lab's research in this area takes a multidisciplinary approach including organic and medicinal chemistry and computational tools to design and achieve desired molecules; structural biology and biophysics to study binary and ternary complexes in solution and reveal their structural and dynamic interactions; and chemical biology, biochemistry, proteomics and cell biology to study the cellular impact of our small molecules into relevant cellular systems and disease models. Dr Ciulli’s laboratory has made significant contributions to the development of proteolysis-targeting chimeric molecules (PROTACs) as a viable strategy for targeted protein degradation. Amongst his most significant discoveries are the fragment-based design of ligands for the protein von Hippel-Lindau (VHL), and their use to design one of the first and to date best-characterized VHL-based PROTACs: the Brd4 degrader MZ1. Solving the structure of the ternary bridging complex VHL:MZ1:Brd4, he unravelled fundamental insights into PROTACs’ mechanism of action. He has also developed further small molecule ligands and degraders for hard-to-target proteins, and provided a rational basis to improve existing PROTACs and to design the next-generation of targeted protein degradation systems. Dr Ciulli graduated Magna Cum Laude in Chemistry from the University of Florence in 2002. His final year Laurea project was in computational drug design and NMR spectroscopy of Matrix Metalloproteases with the late Professor Ivano Bertini at the Magnetic Resonance Center (CERM). In 2002 he was awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to study at Cambridge under the supervision of Professor Chris Abell. His PhD research, in collaboration with Dr Glyn Williams at Astex Pharmaceuticals, concerned with studying weak protein-ligand interactions using biophysical and structural methods. In 2006 he was awarded a College Research Fellowship to conduct post-doctoral research on fragment-based drug discovery, within the framework of two international consortia to develop new drugs against tuberculosis funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the European Union FP6, jointly directed by Professor Abell and Professor Sir Tom Blundell. A Human Frontier Science Programme (HFSP) Fellowship allowed him to visit Yale University during February-May 2009, to start collaboration with Professor Craig Crews on small molecule PROTACs. He was awarded a BBSRC David Phillips Fellowship and returned to Cambridge in June 2009 to start his independent research group within the Department of Chemistry. In April 2013, he moved his group to Dundee University to take up a Readership (Associate Professorship), and was promoted to Full Professor in October 2016.