Alessio Ciulli PhD, FRS, FRSE, FRSC

Alessio Ciulli holds the Personal Chair of Chemical Structural Biology at the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee. He is the Founder and Director of Dundee’s new Centre for Targeted Protein Degradation, a new research center devoted to fundamental and translational chemical biology and focused on innovating discoveries and tools to advance next-generation therapeutics in the fields of targeted protein degradation (TPD) and other proximity-based pharmacology. He is also the scientific founder of Amphista Therapeutics, a biotech company spin-out of his Dundee laboratory that develops new protein degradation platforms.

Research in his laboratory focuses on developing small molecules inducing protein degradation and target protein-protein interactions. Alessio 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 zinc metalloproteases with the late Ivano Bertini at the Magnetic Resonance Center (CERM). In 2002, he was awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to study at Cambridge. His PhD research, under the supervision of Chris Abell and in collaboration with Glyn Williams’s biophysics team at Astex Pharmaceuticals, was concerned with biophysical and structural studies of protein-ligand interactions and enzyme mechanism.

In 2006, he was awarded a College Research Fellowship to conduct post-doctoral research on biophysical fragment screening and fragment-based drug design, 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 Chris Abell and Tom Blundell. A short Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) Fellowship allowed Alessio to visit Yale University in February 2009 and initiate collaboration with Craig Crews on structure-based design of small molecule inducers of intracellular protein degradation (PROTACs) targeting the von Hippel-Lindau protein (VHL). He returned to Cambridge in June 2009 to start his independent research career as a BBSRC David Phillips Fellow within the Department of Chemistry.

In 2013, Alessio was awarded an ERC Starting Grant and moved his laboratory to Dundee, where he took up a Readership (Associate Professorship) in Chemical & Structural Biology as Principal Investigator within the Division of Biological Chemistry and Drug Discovery of the School of Life Sciences. He was promoted to Professor (Chair) in October 2016.