Meet Ali Tavassoli

Ali developed the technology behind Curve Therapeutics’ Microcycle discovery platform, which is designed to discover inhibitors of challenging intracellular targets, including protein-protein interactions. His academic work at the University of Southampton has focused on high-throughput screening platforms and the conversion of cyclic peptide hits into potential new therapeutics.

In 2024, Ali co-authored the first report of a dual HIF-1 and HIF-2 inhibitor, discovered using his SICLOPPS screening platform, highlighting the potential of Microcycles to address cancer-relevant targets once considered difficult to drug. A former President of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Chemistry and Biology Interface Division, Ali was also awarded the RSC Interdisciplinary Prize in 2026, recognizing a career spent pushing chemical biology toward new therapeutic possibilities.

“The expansion of what we consider druggable is moving faster than many realize. For decades the industry accepted that around 80 percent of disease-relevant proteins – transcription factors, scaffolding proteins, and the vast landscape of intracellular protein-protein interactions – were simply out of reach. That assumption is quietly collapsing. Cyclic peptides, molecular glues, targeted protein degraders, and covalent approaches to previously inert residues are all chipping away at it in parallel. Targets we wrote off 20 years ago are now legitimate starting points for drug discovery programs.”