Meet 2025 Infection Science Awardee: Dr Helen Savage
Posted on April 11, 2025 by Microbiology Society
The Microbiology Society Infection Science Award aims to support the exchange of ideas and the career development of promising early-career and trainee researchers, helping to translate microbiological research to the clinic. The scheme facilitates selected presenters from the Federation of Infection Society (FIS) conference to present their work at Annual Conference.
In this blog, meet one of this year’s awardees, Dr Helen Savage, University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, UK, who presented in the Infection Forum session at Annual Conference 2025 last week.
What are your current research interests?
My main research interest is how to use diagnostics in clinical practice to diagnose infectious diseases that are transmissible from person to person. I have been researching how self-sampling can be used to increase the number of people who can access diagnostics and how different sampling methods affect the accuracy of diagnostic tests. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I researched using self-taken swabs for lateral flow tests to diagnose COVID-19, and I am now applying that learning to diagnosing TB. TB is difficult to diagnose in those who cannot produce sputum samples, and using tongue swabs is an alternative method of getting a sample that I am investigating.
What is the theme of your talk?
My talk explored how different sampling methods and processing steps can affect the accuracy of testing to diagnose TB. To do this, I compared self-taken and health worker-taken tongue swabs for TB and analysed the way different steps in the processing stages affect the sensitivity of the samples.
How would you explain your research to a GCSE student?
Tuberculosis (TB) is an infection that can affect any part of the body but often affects the lungs, causing people to develop a cough, lose weight and become seriously unwell. To diagnose TB, most people will give a sputum/phlegm sample that they cough up. Some people, however, can't cough anything up, which means there is nothing to test for the bacteria that cause TB. I investigated using tongue swabs (the kind that you may have used to do a COVID test) to sample for TB and see if we could find the TB bacteria on the tongue. We got people to take their own swabs, and then a health worker took a swab as well to see if we could find the TB bacteria, and did it make a difference who took the swab?
If you could do any other job, what would it be?
I always wanted to be an astronaut! That is what led me to look at a career in science in the first place and led to me becoming a doctor.
Why is it important for the infection science community to engage with the Microbiology Society?
Translating laboratory and basic science research into clinical practice requires communication and collaboration between all disciplines to allow us to best use the wealth of knowledge and science carried out by microbiologists to benefit those in clinical practice. Without this engagement, there are often missed opportunities to use our advances in science to benefit patients.