Andrea Cipriani

My knowledge and skills focus around two main research streams. The first aspect is evidence synthesis and the development of innovative methodologies and novel statistical techniques to drive discovery in psychiatric treatments and facilitate the translation of scientific evidence into clinical practice. Our work produced the first evidence-based ranking of treatments for depression, bipolar disorder and psychosis, which have informed clinical guidelines in a number of countries, including Australia and New Zealand (Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists Mood Disorders Clinical Practice Guidelines), Canada (Canadian Network for Mood and Anxiety Treatments guidelines), the UK (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidelines, Maudsley Prescribing Guidelines in Psychiatry, British Association for Psychopharmacology guidelines) and the US (American Psychiatric Association guidelines). By including drugs from the WHO List of Essential Medicines, our research has had an impact on the prescription of psychiatric drugs in primary and secondary care also in low- and middle-income countries.

The second research stream is data science and deep phenotyping in precision psychiatry. As part of my NIHR Research Professorship and with the support of my team at the Oxford Precision Psychiatry Lab, I developed the PETRUSHKA tool, an innovative online, evidence-based patient decision aid to support shared decision-making in real-world practice, using a bespoke algorithm to identify which antidepressants work better for each individual patient. The PETRUSHKA tool is based on prediction models, which use a combination of advanced analytics and machine learning methods and utilises electronic health records from primary care patients and individual patient data from randomised trials in depression. The recently awarded PRADA study (funded by Wellcome) is the next step after PETRUSHKA. This project aims to add genetic predictors to an evidence-based multimodal web-tool, to help patients and clinicians choose the best pharmacological treatment for depression jointly. We will produce evidence-based stratified recommendations about multi-stage pharmacological treatment for depression in adults, using pharmacogenetics and polygenic risk scores and assessing the tool in a global randomised trial in Africa, Asia and the UK. PRADA will pave the way to build a platform that will next incorporate also other predictors, such as inflammatory/autoimmune biomarkers and neuroimaging. 

I have been working closely with world class academic institutions in Europe, US, Japan, Australia, South Africa and important organisations, such as the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence in London, the European Medicines Agency in Amsterdam, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research in Ottawa, the United Nations in Vienna and the World Health Organization in Geneva. In past few years, I have extended my network of collaborations, working with neurologists on migraine, epilepsy and, more broadly, brain health, and I'm now involved in many projects in digital health in collaboration with the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre at Harvard University. 

I have conceived, designed and led GALENOS, an international Wellcome-funded project developing innovative evidence synthesis methodologies to address the main challenges in mental health. It is based on a creative, dynamic process of integration of scientific data, animal models, industry collaboration and input from people with lived experience. This new approach emphasizes collaboration among multidisciplinary experts (also from the Global South) to agree on priorities, triangulate evidence, and continuously update findings, which are made available in an open access repository for the wider research community.

I was awarded an MD from the University of Padua and, after training as a psychiatrist, I got a PhD at the University of Verona. I am currently Editor in Chief of BMJ Mental Health and I am on the Editorial Board of the Lancet Psychiatry.

Alongside my career in mental health, I have been an organist and composer, with degrees in Organ and Composition at the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia in Rome, and in Orgelkonzertfach at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna. These are two examples of "my" music: a recent recital at Keble College, Oxford, playing Bach, Pachelbel and Pärt, and an extract from my rewriting of the Goldberg Variations for harp, flute and viola.

@And_Cipriani