Professor Karin Hellner
Associate Professor in Women's Health, Nuffield Department of Women’s & Reproductive Health
Professor Karin Hellner is a well-respected and highly-accomplished academic consultant gynaecologist who specialises in colposcopy and cervical abnormalities. She leads the Oxford HPV research group at the University of Oxford and has been the clinical lead for the colposcopy service at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust since 2017.
Academic profile
About
Professor Karin Hellner obtained her medical degree from the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2003, undertaking specialist training in obstetrics and gynaecology at both the Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin in Germany and Oxford.
With a dedicated focus on women's health, Professor Hellner spent four years as a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School and its teaching hospital Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, USA. During this time, her research primarily centred on unravelling the molecular mechanisms underlying human papillomavirus (HPV) associated carcinogenesis and devising innovative drug discovery strategies for cervical cancer.
In 2011, Professor Hellner joined the University of Oxford as a clinical lecturer, later earning recognition as a senior fellow in Women's Health in 2017.
Professor Hellner leads a cutting-edge research program that studies the body’s immune response to HPV and uncover its therapeutic vulnerabilities. Beyond her academic and clinical pursuits, Professor Hellner plays an active role in professional organizations and is currently writing a colposcopy textbook commissioned by Oxford University Press.
Expertise
- Cervical cancer
- HPV (human papillomavirus)
- CIN (cervical intraepithelial neoplasia)
- Cancer at Oxford
- Cervical cancer screening
- Colposcopy
Selected publications
- Concomitant low-grade B-cell lymphoma and cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (BMJ, Jan 2026)
- A Phase 1b/2, Randomised, Placebo-controlled Study to Evaluate Safety, Tolerability, Efficacy, and Immunogenicity of VTP-200, a Chimpanzee Adenovirus and Modified Vaccinia Ankara-vectored Multigenotype High-risk Human Papillomavirus Vaccine in Women With Low-grade Cervical Lesions (Clinical Infectious Diseases, 2025)
- Global burden of bacterial antimicrobial resistance 1990–2021: a systematic analysis with forecasts to 2050 (The Lancet, 2024)
- Emergency hysterectomy following iatrogenic injury to the descending branch of the uterine artery during colposcopy (BMJ Case Reports, 2023)
- A multi-genotype therapeutic human papillomavirus vaccine elicits potent T cell responses to conserved regions of early proteins (Scientific Reports, 2019)
- Therapeutic HPV vaccines (Best Practice & Research Clinical Obstetrics & Gynaecology, 2018)
- Recent advances in understanding and preventing human papillomavirus-related disease (F1000Research, 2017)
- Human Papillomaviruses As Therapeutic Targets in Human Cancer (Journal of Clinical Oncology, 2011)