Prof. Ciulli will discuss how protein degraders, including PROTACs and molecular glues, recruit target proteins to E3 ligases for ubiquitination and proteasomal degradation. His group studies the structures and mechanisms behind these interactions and uses this knowledge to design degraders for difficult targets such as BRD9, SMARCA2, KRAS and LRRK2. The talk will also cover new concepts, including trivalent PROTACs, dynamic combinatorial PROTACs and intramolecular bivalent glues.
About the speaker
Prof. Alessio Ciulli studied chemistry in Florence and earned his PhD as a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge in 2006. After postdoctoral work at Cambridge and a short stay at Yale University, he returned to Cambridge to start his independent lab. In 2013 he received an ERC Starting Grant and moved to the University of Dundee, where he became a full professor in 2016. He has received several awards for his work in chemical biology and drug discovery.
