Professor Andrew S Rice

Andrew Rice is Professor of Pain Research at Imperial College and an Hon. Consultant in Pain Medicine at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, providing a service for patients with neuropathic pain.

He qualified in medicine at St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School in 1982 and received his research doctorate from St. Thomas’ Hospital Medical School (UMDS) in 1991. He completed his specialist training in Oxford before coming to Imperial College in 1995.

Andrew is Administrative Director of the London Pain Consortium (www.lpc.ac.uk), which is currently funded by a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award. He is a Workpackage Leader and Steering Committee member in the European Union and EFPIA-funded “Innovative Medicines Initiative” collaboration “EUROPAIN”.

His research is devoted to elucidating basic and clinical aspects of neuropathic pain. Particular areas of interest include:

• Revealing the pharmacology of cannabinoid analgesia and pursuing strategies for improving the therapeutic index of cannabinoids.
• Developing models of herpes zoster-associated pain and HIV GP120 and antiretroviral-induced neuropathies. Using these models to reveal pain mechanisms in these diseases.
• Investigating the neurobiology of the relationship between neuropathic pain and co-morbidities such as anxiety, depression and circadian rhythm disturbance.
• Identification and exploitation of novel mechanistic and drug targets in neuropathic pain using functional genomics.  
• Identification of sources of experimental bias in animal models.
• A programme of clinical pheno-/geno-typing studies which seeks to identify risk factors for developing neuropathic pain.
• Conducting meta-analyses of the clinical evidence for therapies in neuropathic pain

 He executes a number of responsibilities relating to education and training. For example, he leads the Faculty of Medicine programme for medical students who undertake a PhD (MB BS/PhD) and is Site Tutor for Postgraduate Research Students at Chelsea and Westminster. At the Royal College of Anaesthetists, he served on the Founding Board of the Faculty of Pain Medicine and was a Regional Advisor for the Faculty until 2009.

Andrew serves on the Editorial boards of: Pain, PLoS Medicine and the European Neurological Journal and is lead editor of theTextbook of Clinical Pain Management, published by Hodder.

He is Secretary of the International Association for the Study of Pain, Special Interest Group on Neuropathic Pain (NeuPSIG) – www.neupsig.org. He has served on the British Pain Society Council.

Andrew was the Michael Cousins lecturer at the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists in 2009; Covino Lecturer at Harvard University in 2008; a plenary lecturer at the 10th World Congress of Pain in 2002 and the Patrick D. Wall Professor at the Royal College of Anaesthetists in 1998.