Philip Scheltens

During his PhD, which he defended and received om March 3, 1993, he developed MRI criteria to score hippocampus atrophy for the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.

As from 2022 he is staff neurologist at the Alzheimer Center which he combines with his role as head of EQT Life Sciences Dementia Fund (formerly known as LSP).

While diagnosis used to be based on specific signs and symptoms and exclusion of treatable causes, he was the first to add MRI criteria for hippocampal atrophy, associated with Alzheimer's' disease in the 1990s, which improved the diagnostic classification of this type of dementia and fueled development of new diagnostics.

Higher diagnostic precision is the crucial step to develop effective therapy, as patients with homogeneous underlying pathology can be included for therapeutic trials targeting the causative mechanism.

The new protein-based diagnostic criteria he fathered are now implemented for trials worldwide and the first hopeful results have emerged.