Rick Body

Rick is a Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Manchester, an Honorary Consultant in Emergency Medicine and the Group Director of Research & Innovation at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust. Professor Body’s research is diagnostic focused. He was the first to report on the use of low concentrations of cardiac troponin, measured with a high-sensitivity assay, to rule out the diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction with a single blood test. That strategy is now recommended for clinical use by NICE and the European Society of Cardiology. Professor Body also derived and validated the Manchester Acute Coronary Syndromes decision aid, a version of which is used in practice across Greater Manchester and beyond to guide the care of patients with suspected cardiac chest pain. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Professor Body has been co-lead for the COVID-19 National Diagnostic Research & evaluation programme (CONDOR), which has provided holistic evaluation of multiple commercially supplied in vitro diagnostic tests (IVDs) for COVID-19. Within the CONDOR programme, Professor Body is chief investigator of the Facilitating Accelerated Clinical Validation of Novel diagnostics for COVID-19 (FALCON C-19) study, an NIHR Urgent Public Health Study that has recruited almost 6,000 patients at 70 hospitals and 14 testing centres across the United Kingdom, providing clinical validation for approximately 20 commercially supplied IVDs for COVID-19. Professor Body sits on the International Federation for Clinical Chemistry Committee for Cardiac Biomarkers (IFCC-CCB), he was the co-founder and inaugural director of the Manchester Diagnostics and Technology Accelerator (DiTA) and the NIHR Incubator for Emergency Care, and he is Deputy National Specialty Lead for Trauma & Emergency Care at the NIHR Clinical Research Network.