DrHelen Payne

MBChB (Hons), BSc International Health (Hons), MRCPCH, PhD

Helen is a Senior Clinical Lecturer at Imperial College London, dividing her time between teaching, research and working clinically as a consultant in Paediatric Infectious Diseases and Immunology at Bristol Royal Hospital for Children. She is also an honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health at Stellenbosch University, and a member of The Reproductive Immunology Research Consortium in Africa (RIRCA).

Helen completed her PhD from University College London in 2016, examining thymic output, HIV-seronegativity, and reservoirs in children with perinatally-acquired HIV (paHIV) from The CHER trial. She compared immune activation and thymic output between participants from CHER and healthy HIV-uninfected peers in South Africa.

Helen’s research interests are in congenital and neonatal infection, co-infections and neonatal immune ontogeny. The theme of her work is understanding mechanisms of severe cytomegalovirus (CMV) disease in infants and immune-suppressed young children, with focus upon stratifying treatment approaches, and she is running several studies within this theme. She is the Principal Investigator for the following studies:

1) The CHECKPOINT Study at St Mary's Hospital, examines how co-infection with EBV or CMV in young people with paHIV, may be associated with immune activation and dysregulation, and subsequent increased risk of lymphoma, and cardiovascular and respiratory disease. These relationships are being explored a cohort of young people with paHIV in Zimbabwe (The Breathe trial).

2) TINI-CC aims to identify transcriptomic and immunological signatures associated with neurodevelopmental and hearing outcomes in congenital CMV (cCMV). Such biomarkers might be used to predict long-term and late onset sequalae, support universal screening and inform treatment strategies for infants with cCMV. This study started at St Mary's Hospital and is now running at 14 sites including Attikon University, Athens, funded by Imperial BRC. Samples from children recruited to these studies are being used in collaborator studies to improve cCMV diagnostics such as a point-of-care saliva test and/or as part of the newborn screening heel-prick blood test. Our study group has been awarded funding from The Imperial Health Charity and CMV Action to fund a clinical psychologist to work alongside the cCMV clinic at St Mary’s Hospital to characterise the issues faced by families with cCMV, and demonstrate the benefit of a clinical psychology service for these families. We are also working with parents of infants with cCMV to produce a short film, funded by St Mary's Children's Fund to raise awareness about cCMV.

3) The CHERI study at Stellenbosch University examines CMV and HIV-Exposure in pRemature and very low birthweight South African Infants. We have shown a very high rate of 7% cCMV and 5% symptomatic pCMV in this population.