Prof. Nicole Horwood
Professor of Musculoskeletal Medicine
Nikki Horwood is a molecular and cellular biologist who specializes in the loss or gain of bone mass during disease. The loss of bone is a problem in many inflammatory diseases and there are few therapeutic options to replace bone once it has been lost. Her research focuses on the underlying cellular causes of bone loss and identification of potential therapeutic options.
She completed her PhD on cytokine control of osteoclast differentiation in 1999 at St Vincent’s Institute, University of Melbourne before undertaking work into cytokine signaling in macrophages at Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, Imperial College London. Nikki established her independent research group in 2004 at Imperial College London before moving to University of Oxford with the Kennedy Institute in 2011 to continue her research into bone changes as a consequence of inflammation, increasing age and cancer.
Nikki is currently a Versus Arthritis Senior Research Fellow. Her current research projects investigate links between bone marrow composition and multiple myeloma, inflammation-driven fracture repair, osteoblast dedifferentiation, and mechanisms of new bone formation in ankylosing spondylitis and osteoarthritis.