Gilbert M. Rishton, Ph.D. has led drug discovery programs in the pharmaceutical industry for over fifteen years, primarily at Amgen. He was the founding medicinal chemist at Amgen’s Thousand Oaks site, and was repsonsible for initiating and building the Amgen Small Molecule Drug Discovery Group, which has grown to become one of the most formidable in the pharmaceutical industry. He was also the chemistry manager for Amgen’s Sensipar development program, which spanned several phases from preclinical development to manufacturing and then human clinical trials, resulting in the commercial launch of Sensipar, Amgen’s first orally administered small molecule product. He also led the medicinal chemistry program for Amgen’s Secretase Team, which was among the first to produce small molecule secretase inhibitors as potential therapeutic agents for Alzheimer’s disease. Dr. Rishton is also Founder and Director of the Channel Islands Alzheimer’s Institute, a nonprofit whose mission is to enable new drug development through the identification of high quality novel drug leads that might become Alzheimer’s disease medicines of the future.

 drug discovery