Tonia Vincent

Tonia Vincent studied medicine at UCL, qualifying in 1993. She trained as a junior doctor in London, later specialising in Rheumatology. In 1998 she took time out to do a PhD at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology under Professor Jeremy Saklatvala (awarded 2002). She continued at the Kennedy Institute as a Wellcome Trust clinician scientist and subsequently as an Arthritis Research UK Senior Fellow. In 2012 the Kennedy Institute moved to the University of Oxford and she was appointed Professor of Musculoskeletal Biology.

She directs the Centre for OA Pathogenesis funded by Versus Arthritis. Her research interests include pathways that drive mechanosensitive responses in cartilage, the role of the pericellular matrix in determining these responses and how they modulate osteoarthritis in vivo. Her group was the first to describe spontaneous late OA pain in murine OA and to define the role of nerve growth factor on this process. Through the OA Centre she has created the infrastructure to support a translational pipeline to test discoveries arriving from basic science. Since 2019 she has led the STEpUP OA consortium, the largest international effort to date to define molecular endotypes within OA. 

Her work is funded by Versus Arthritis, MRC, ERC, FOREUM, Dunhill Trust and the Kennedy Trust for Rheumatology Research. She continues to be clinically active, running both osteoarthritis clinics and the multidisciplinary Marfan Syndrome clinic.