AC
Alessio Ciulli
University of Dundee, UK
Title: New insights and twists on PROTAC and molecular glue degraders design and mechanism
Alessio Ciulli studied chemistry in Florence, Italy, and obtained his PhD as a Gates Scholar from the University of Cambridge, UK, in 2006. After postdoctoral research as a College Research Fellow at Cambridge and a brief visit at Yale University in the USA, he returned to Cambridge to start his independent laboratory in 2010 upon the award of a BBSRC David Phillips Fellowship. In 2013, he was awarded an ERC Starting Grant and moved to the University of Dundee, UK, where he was promoted to full professor in 2016. He has received numerous prizes and awards for his discoveries, including the EFMC Prize for Young Medicinal Chemist in Academia (2015), the ICBS Young Chemical Biologist Award (2015), the RSC Capps Green Zomaya Award (2016), the RSC MedChemComm Emerging Investigator Lectureship (2016), and the Prous Institute - Overton and Meyer Award for New Technologies in Drug Discovery (2022). In 2023 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE). He is the scientific founder of Amphista therapeutics, a targeted protein degradation company spin out of his laboratory, and the founder and director of the University of Dundee’s new Centre for Targeted Protein Degradation (CeTPD) which opened its laboratories in January 2023. The Ciulli research group designs and develops small molecules inducing targeted protein degradation and modulating protein-protein interactions. Their research takes a multidisciplinary approach including organic and medicinal chemistry and computational tools to design and developed high-quality molecules; structural biology and biophysics to study binary and ternary complexes in solution and reveal 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, Ciulli is passionate about translating fundamental research via collaboration partnerships with the biopharma industry and by creation of spin-out companies.