The Medical Research Council Prize Committee has awarded the RECOVERY trial team the MRC Impact Prize 2022 for Outstanding Team Impact. The award was presented by Professor John Iredale, Interim Executive Chair of the Medical Research Council, and Catherine Law, Professor of Public Health and Epidemiology at UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, and accepted by members of the trial team at the MRC Prizes 2022 Awards ceremony in Birmingham on 14 March 2023.
The RECOVERY Trial is the world’s largest study of COVID-19 therapies. It was launched in UK hospitals at the start of the pandemic, only nine days after the idea was first conceived. Within three months, the trial had delivered the first major breakthrough in the COVID-19 response – the finding that the inexpensive steroid, dexamethasone, reduced deaths by up to a third. In the following nine months, this result saved an estimated million lives worldwide.
Since launching, RECOVERY has identified three other effective COVID-19 treatments, and shown that seven others are ineffective, enabling healthcare services to prioritise their resources and saving patients from being exposed to ineffective or harmful treatments. The trial has recruited over 48,000 participants, and expanded to seven countries in Africa and Asia.