[1] Alessi Ciulli attended University of Florence in his hometown with an undergraduate laurea in chemistry and graduated magna cum laude.
Under the late Prof Ivano Bertini, his final year laurea project was in computational drug design and NMR spectroscopy of matrix metalloproteases.
[2] Awarded with a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, he did his PhD under the supervision of the late Professor Chris Abell at the University of Cambridge and in collaboration with Astex Technology ( now Astex Pharmaceuticals ) produced a thesis concerned with studying weak protein-ligand interactions using biophysical and structural methods.
Ciulli and his colleagues were the first to produce an X-ray crystal structure of a class of PROTAC simultaneously bound to the target protein and the E3 ubiquitin ligase.
[7][8][9][10] In general, Ciulli's scientific contributions focus on targeted protein degradation (TPD) as a therapeutic modality in cancer and other diseases.