Sir Martin Landray

Discovery

BBC

Science

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 12 September 2022

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Who could forget the beginning of 2020, when a ‘mysterious viral pneumonia’ emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Soon, other countries were affected and deaths around the world began to climb. Perhaps most alarmingly of all, there were no proven treatments to help prevent those deaths.

As the World Health Organisation declared the Covid-19 outbreak a pandemic, and the UK and the rest of the world braced itself for what was to come, doctor and drug-trial designer Martin Landray had his mind on a solution, devising the protocol, or blueprint, for the world’s largest drug trial for Covid-19.

As Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Oxford University, Martin was perfectly positioned to jump, delivering what became known as the RECOVERY Trial. The trial was tasked to deliver clarity amid the predicted chaos of the pandemic and galvanised every acute NHS hospital in the UK. Within its first one hundred days, it had yielded three major discoveries and it has transformed Covid-19 treatment worldwide, already saving over a million lives. Sir Martin Landray was recently knighted for this work and RECOVERY’s legacy lives on, not just for Covid. Martin plans to revolutionise drug trials for other diseases too.

Transcript

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0:42.5	of the 20th century, whose name has been all but forgotten.
0:47.0	Aura Washington.
0:48.8	Stay listening at the end of this podcast to find out more.
0:52.0	This is Discovery from the BBC World Service.
1:00.0	I'm Jumal Khalili and in my series The Life Scientific,
1:03.6	I get to talk to some of the extraordinary men and women who are trying to understand our world
1:08.5	and make it a better place.
1:10.6	I want to take you back to early 2020.
1:13.6	A mysterious viral pneumonia emerges in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
1:18.3	It's highly contagious.
1:20.1	Soon more countries are affected.
1:22.1	Deaths are on the rise around the world and perhaps most alarmingly of all,
1:26.5	no proven treatments to prevent those deaths.
	...

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