Alessio Ciulli

Alessio Ciulli has made transformative contributions to the structural biology of targeted protein degradation at the University of Dundee, solving crystal structures of PROTAC ternary complexes that revealed the cooperative binding mechanisms underlying efficient protein degradation. His work on VHL-recruiting PROTACs demonstrated that ternary complex formation rather than simple binary affinity determines degradation efficiency, fundamentally changing how degraders are designed. He has established the structural and biophysical framework for rational PROTAC optimization that is now widely used across the pharmaceutical industry.