Professor Craig Ritchie

Chair of the Psychiatry of Ageing and Director of the Centre for Dementia Prevention

Biography

Background

Prof Ritchie is currently Professor of the Psychiatry of Ageing at the University of Edinburgh having moved from his role as Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Mental Health at Imperial College London in October 2014.

Research summary

Professor Ritchie is a leading authority on Clinical Trials in Dementia and has been senior investigator on over 30 drug trials of both disease modifying and symptomatic agents for that condition. This emerged from his ongoing clinical leadership of the MPAC (Metal Protein Attenuating Compound) pipeline for Prana Biotechnology dating back to 1998 when he worked as a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Mental Health Research Institute in Victoria, Australia. He has sat on advisory boards of numerous pharmaceutical companies, biotechs and clinical research organizations with an in interest in developing drugs and trials infrastructure for Alzheimer’s disease.

He has published extensively on the topics of dementia and delirium including clinical trials and meta-analyses. He sits on several advisory boards for major pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies as well as The Wellcome Trust and the Public Health Steering Group for the Alzheimer’s Society. He is also one of the leading editors in the Cochrane Collaboration’s Dementia Group with a particular specialism in Diagnostic Test Accuracy reviews and is Assistant Editor for the journal International Psychogeriatrics.

He is leading the PREVENT project; a major initiative nationally which will identify mid-life risks for later life dementia and characterize early changes of neurodegenerative disease through imaging, genetic, cognitive and biomarker analyses.

He also leads the EPAD (European Prevention of Alzheimer’s Dementia) Consortium which is an IMI funded, 5-year grant application to establish a Pan-European network of Trial Delivery Centers with supporting infrastructure to undertake a perpetual, Proof of Concept multi-arm trial secondary trial for secondary prevention of Alzheimer’s dementia. This work will be led from Edinburgh.

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