Dr. Rishton is a co-founder and the inventor of the proprietary conditioned extraction chemical library at Cognition Therapeutics. He has widespread pharma drug discovery experience and has led drug discovery programs across multiple therapeutic areas for over 20 years. He has leveraged this experience to develop medicinal chemistry scaffolds instrumental in identifying sigma-2/PGRMC1 as a pharmacologically attractive Alzheimer’s drug target.

Dr. Rishton was the founding medicinal chemist at Amgen’s Thousand Oaks site and was responsible for much of the program initiation and group building for the Amgen Small Molecule Drug Discovery Group. He led the medicinal chemistry program for Amgen’s Secretase Team, among the first to produce small molecule secretase inhibitors as potential therapeutic agents for Alzheimer’s disease. He was also the chemistry manager for Amgen’s Sensipar pre-clinical and clinical development programs which spanned seven years and involved all facets of development including PKDM profiling, formulation, manufacturing, and human clinical trials resulting in the commercial launch of Amgen’s first oral small molecule product, Sensipar. Later, Dr. Rishton retired from Amgen to continue his efforts toward Alzheimer’s disease drug development as founder and director of the nonprofit Channel Islands Alzheimer’s Institute.

Management Team