Dr Alessio Ciulli

Dr Alessio Ciulli holds the Personal Chair of Chemical Structural Biology at the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee. He is also the Founder and Director of Dundee’s Centre for Targeted Protein Degradation (CeTPD). Dr Alessio’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 E3 ligase von Hippel-Lindau (VHL), and their use to design one of the first VHL-based PROTACs: the BET degrader MZ1. Alessio’s Llab later illuminated fundamental insights into PROTACs’ mechanism of action, solving the first crystal structure of a PROTAC ternary complex. 

Alessio is the scientific founder of Amphista therapeutics, a company that develops new protein degradation platforms. Before joining Dundee, Alessio was a group leader at the University of Cambridge, where he previously earned his PhD degree. Amongst his honours are the EFMC Prize for Young Medicinal Chemist in Academia, the RSC Capps Green Zomaya Award in medicinal computational chemistry, and election as Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.