Rory Edwards Collins

Rory Collins is an epidemiologist who studies how to prevent and treat cardiovascular disease in large population-based studies. He trained in Medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School, London University, and Statistics at George Washington University and Oxford University. During the 1980s and early 1990s, Rory coordinated the ISIS 'mega-trials' of the emergency treatment of heart attacks involving more than 130,00 patients. These trials showed that clot-dissolving and clot-preventing treatment could more than halve mortality, and these treatments rapidly became part of routine care (and paved the way for non-pharmaceutical approaches to opening coronary arteries). Since the early 1990s, he has been involved in conducting large-scale randomized trials of the effects of modifying blood levels of cholesterol. For example, the 20,000 patient Heart Protection Study that he led showed that lowering LDL-cholesterol with statin therapy safely reduces the risk of death and disability from heart attacks and strokes among a very wide range of individuals. As a consequence, statin therapy is used extensively worldwide. Rory was appointed British Heart Foundation Professor of Medicine & Epidemiology at Oxford University in 1996, Principal Investigator of the UK Biobank prospective study of 500,000 people in 2005, and Head of the Nuffield Department of Population Health in 2013. He was knighted for services to Science in 2011 and was elected to the Royal Society in 2015. The streamlined approaches to the design and conduct of randomized trials that Rory pioneered with his colleague Professor Sir Richard Peto are central to the success of the RECOVERY trial of the effects of treatments for COVID-19, which is being coordinated by the Nuffield Department of Population Health. Data from UK Biobank have been made freely available to about 15,000 researchers worldwide for about 1500 health-related research projects, including studies of both genetic and non-genetic determinants of adverse outcomes due to SARS-CoV-2 infection. The repeat imaging of seropositive and seronegative individuals selected from among the 50,000 UK Biobank participants who had previously been imaged will yield the only study in the world with both pre- and post-infection imaging data, allowing causal effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection on internal organ systems to be determined reliably.