Professor Alessio Ciulli is the first Gates Cambridge Scholar to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Our main goal is to make meaningful advances in fundamental understanding that accelerate the development of new medicines. It is therefore very encouraging to see our efforts acknowledged by the Royal Society.
Professor Alessio Ciulli
Professor Alessio Ciulli has become the first Gates Cambridge Scholar to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society [FRS].
Professor Ciulli, the founder and Director of the University of Dundee’s Centre for Targeted Protein Degradation (CeTPD), is one of over 90 outstanding researchers from across the world to be elected an FRS.
He is a pioneer of research in targeted protein degradation, a transformative approach in drug discovery which leverages the cell’s natural protein disposal system to remove specific, disease-causing proteins. It is applicable across a broad range of therapeutic areas — including cancer, inflammation, metabolic and neurological disorders.
Protein degrader medicines have the potential to be more effective than traditional drugs and offer hope for patients who have no treatment options or who no longer respond to therapies.
Professor Ciulli said: “Being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society is an incredible and humbling honour, and it’s a privilege to be recognised alongside so many esteemed colleagues. Our main goal is to make meaningful advances in fundamental understanding that accelerate the development of new medicines. It is therefore very encouraging to see our efforts acknowledged by the Royal Society.”
The Royal Society is the world’s oldest scientific academy in continuous existence. Previous Fellows include Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein.
Welcoming the new Fellows, Sir Adrian Smith, President of the Royal Society, said: “The strength of the Fellowship lies not only in individual excellence, but in the diversity of backgrounds, perspectives and experiences each new member brings. This cohort represents the truly global nature of modern science and the importance of collaboration in driving scientific breakthroughs.”
Career pathway
Professor Ciulli says his work at Cambridge was crucial to his current research.
His PhD thesis, under the supervision of the late Professor Chris Abell and Dr Glyn Williams, focused on applications of biophysical methods to study mechanistic enzymology and protein-ligand interactions. He says it was “real fundamental stuff, but always with an eye to application”.
During his postdoctoral research at Cambridge, he recognised the potential of fragment-based design and the approaches that he had developed during his PhD for building high-quality small molecules “binders” for proteins. Later with his independent research group, he pioneered a new area of research – proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs) to get around challenges to the binding process in cells. PROTACs are bifunctional molecules that can simultaneously bind a target protein and a ubiquitin E3 ligase to trigger target protein ubiquitination and degradation by the proteasome.
Although the idea of PROTACs had been known for some time and was first proposed in 2001, early molecules were not suitable starting points as they relied on bulky peptides to bind the E3 ligase and their poor drug-like properties limited their utility in cells and put drug companies off. To solve this problem, Professor Ciulli teamed up with Professor Craig Crews’ laboratory at Yale to develop the first non-peptidic ligand for the protein von Hippel-Lindau (VHL), a ubiquitous E3 ligase crucial for oxygen sensing and signalling of low levels of oxygen. This led to early commercial impact through the founding of a PROTAC team at GSK and the Yale spin-off Arvinas. Further drug design optimisation led to a potent VHL ligand that has since featured as core ligand in all VHL-based PROTACs reported to date, including four drugs currently being tested in clinic on cancer patients.
In 2015, Crews and Ciulli independently conjugated their new VHL ligand to a target ligand via chemical linkers, and published landmark papers which marked the beginning of the PROTAC field. Professor Ciulli says: “This work and all the subsequent work we and others in the PROTAC and targeted protein degradation (TPD) field have developed could not have been possible without the early work developing the VHL ligand, which was possible thanks to the understanding, know-how and methods that I had developed during my PhD at Cambridge.”
He has been at the University of Dundee since 2013 and was promoted to full Professor in 2016. In 2017, he co-founded Amphista Therapeutics, a company focused on developing drugs based on targeted protein degradation. He became the inaugural Director of CeTPD upon its opening in 2023.
Cambridge
Professor Ciulli says his time at Cambridge was instrumental to his scientific formation and critical to his personal development. During his PhD research, he collaborated with Professor Abell’s most successful spin-out company, Astex Pharmaceuticals (at the time Astex technology, and then Astex therapeutics) – a pioneer in the emerging field of fragment-based drug discovery. He states: “I was simply in the perfect environment, surrounded by experts and leaders, to learn about inter-disciplinarity, collaboration and linking research to real-world impact – which have all influenced my independent career.”
He adds that his PhD taught him the importance of strong mentorship, independent thinking and scientific leadership. “Chris provided the rare combination of freedom and guidance, encouraging collaboration and inter-disciplinarity, always linking research to real-world impact. His entrepreneurial mindset and humility deeply influenced my approach to science,” he says. “Cambridge offered an environment rich in opportunity, exposing me to world-class researchers and fostering both my confidence and resilience. It was during this period that I truly learned how to think and act like a scientist, translate ideas beyond the lab, and value the human connections that shape a scientific career. These lessons continue to guide me today, and deeply inspired the line of enquiry of my own research group.”
During his time at Cambridge, Professor Ciulli also got involved in non-academic endeavours. For example, in October 2003 he was one of the founding members of CUTEC, The Cambridge University Technology and Enterprise Club. He took up the role of Marketing Director, and was part of the team that organised the very first Technology Ventures Conference in 2004 at the London Guildhall. The conference is now held annually, with the aim of connecting entrepreneurs, academics, investors and business professionals in Cambridge.
Professor Ciulli [2002] adds that being in one of the first cohorts of Gates Cambridge Scholars “felt like being at the outset of something important and new – a pivotal time in my journey not only as a student and scientist, and more broadly as a human being. It was an unprecedented once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a privilege to be a part of…The internationality and globalisation that the Gates Cambridge Scholarship community embodied, instilled a sense of purpose and made me realise that we all had a role to play into something bigger and wider, which is the world we live in.”
