Saving lives through accurate testing
Professor Rick Body, Professor of Emergency Medicine at University of Manchester, and Director of Research and Innovation at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, tells us about his work into developing rapid testing for COVID-19.
A new virus and new ways of testing
COVID-19, which we’re all familiar with now, was a novel virus, which meant it had never before been identified. This also meant that there were no way of testing for it. We knew that there was going to be challenges developing new tests for this new virus. Accurate and accessible testing was going to be key to get the pandemic under control.
An international movement
The effort internationally was really impressive – within a couple of weeks, the virus had been isolated and its genetic sequence posted online. By the end of April, 250 CE-marked tests had already been developed. But we needed to understand how these tests worked, and how accurate they are. Faced with a rapidly increasing rate of infections, we knew that we as a country, and the NHS were going to find it hard to know which new tests to use in practice.
Informing patient care
The Condor programme was a national collaboration of experts in evaluating diagnostic tests. Our job was to find out if rapid tests for COVID-19 could actually be used to guide patient care. We needed to know how accurate these tests were, and whether the tests work in a lab, if they work in hospitals, in GP surgeries, in care homes where clinical staff use them. And then, lastly, how a test can improve the decisions that we make about patient care.
An unforeseen development
We also needed to look at how usable these tests were. We didn’t expect that we’d all be doing self-testing during the pandemic! But we needed to make sure that the lateral flow tests were both accurate and easy to use by the general public. We ended up with four tests that met the criteria for us to use them in practice. If you’re testing yourself or your family using lateral flow tests, there’s a really good chance that we looked at that in the Condor programme.
Testing to save lives
Good, accurate and accessible testing are key to controlling COVID-19 infections. Our work has meant that not only do we have good, reliable tests, but also that they provide rapid results. It also changes how we test for other respiratory viruses, including any future pandemics. This means that we can keep people safe, provide better care, and ultimately save more lives.
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