About Helen Cox MBChB FRCP FRCPCH MD (LDN)
Consultant in Paediatric Allergy & Immunology
Dr Helen Cox read Medicine at the University of Cape Town, graduating in 1985. She specialised in Paediatric Allergy, Immunology and Respiratory Medicine in the UK, training as a registrar at Great Ormond Street and Guy’s Hospitals, London and the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. She became a member of the RCPCH in 1999 and a fellow of the college in 2003. Her doctoral thesis looking at novel genes for atopic eczema was one of the first papers to be published in this field. This subsequently led to the genome wide screen for eczema.
She is now the lead clinician and Consultant in Paediatric Allergy and Immunology at Imperial College NHS Trust, London, where she heads up one of the largest paediatric allergy units within the UK. This is a secondary and tertiary care referral unit with a busy day case unit offering drug and food challenge testing and immunotherapy (web link). The unit has a state of the art paediatric research unit, where clinical trials into the pathogenesis and novel treatments of allergic disease are carried out. Together with her dermatology and nursing colleagues, she established and now runs a tertiary combined allergy/dermatology clinic, receiving referrals from all over the country. She regularly lectures at Imperial College and is one of the clinical course leaders for the MSC in Clinical Allergy, an international training course, based at Imperial College. (website) She is an annual speaker at the British Paediatric Dermatology Congress and the British Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. She is an invited guest speaker at numerous Allergy conferences both within the UK and Europe.
She is a member of The RCPCH, BSACI and EAACI organisations. She is on the editorial board for a number of key journals including Paediatric Allergy and Immunology and Archives of Disease of Childhood. She helped develop the NICE guideline for atopic eczema in children and chaired the RCPCH care pathway guideline for eczema and participated in the RCPCH anaphylaxis care pathway. She is an active participant of the itchysneezywheezy RCPCH care pathway project aimed at improving the quality and access to allergy care within the community. She has established the National grid training programme for Paediatric Allergy at Imperial College.
