Philip Robson

Since the 1980s I have been intrigued by the medicinal properties of cannabis and its derivatives. In 1996 I was commissioned by the UK Department of Health to conduct a critical review of the relevant scientific literature and gave written and verbal evidence to the 1998 House of Lords Science and Technology Inquiry into the potential of cannabis medicines. The positive conclusions from this Inquiry alongside similar judgements from the US Institute of Medicine (1999) were an important stimulus to more rigorous pre-clinical and clinical investigation of this subject.

From 2000 - 2015 I took up the role of Medical Director of GW Pharmaceuticals, a company founded in 1998 in order to cultivate, extract and evaluate cannabinoid medicines, whilst retaining the post of Senior Research Fellow in this department. Early clinical research was carried out from a clinical base in Oxford but quickly became international in scope. Initially the focus was on serious neurological disorders such as multiple sclerosis and epilepsy, but lately I have been particularly interested in the therapeutic potential of cannabinoids in schizophrenia.

An earlier research interest was in the influence of self esteem in psychiatric disorders, which led to the development of the Robson Self Concept Scale.