London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) has established its first Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) with the pharmaceutical company GSK.

The partnership, funded jointly by Innovate UK and GSK, will support the development of target trial emulation approaches at GSK for applications to therapeutic drug development. KTPs bring together academic expertise with businesses to tackle strategic innovation challenges to deliver economic, societal or environmental outcomes.

Target trial emulation (TTE) refers to an approach that uses real-world data, such as disease registries, or patients’ electronic health records, to test the safety and effectiveness of treatments. Using TTE can be a powerful alternative when running a randomised clinical trial would be impractical, enabling important clinical questions to be answered using real-world data that would otherwise remain unanswered - ultimately helping to bring safe and effective treatments to patients more quickly.

Over three years the KTP will see statistician Dr Matthew Smith integrating TTE methods into projects across multiple therapeutic areas at GSK. For the partnership, Dr Matthew Smith will be based at GSK day-to-day, working with Dr Adrian Mander (Head of Statistical Innovation) and Dr Aris Perperoglou (Head of Predictive Modelling) within the Statistics and Data Science Innovation Hub.

Professors Ruth Keogh and Jonathan Bartlett from LSHTM's Medical Statistics Department will provide academic supervision for the project. Both are members of the Centre for Data and Statistical Science for Health (DASH) at LSHTM, which hosted a symposium on TTE in 2025.

Dr Matthew Smith, Statistician and Knowledge Transfer Partnership KTP Associate at LSHTM and GSK, said: “This partnership brings together LSHTM’s academic leadership in causal inference methodology with GSK’s deep pharmaceutical development expertise. Our aim is to demonstrate how target trial emulation can make drug development faster and more efficient, while strengthening the evidence base for regulatory submissions.”

The KTP project will demonstrate how target trial emulation can be applied across several therapeutic areas including vaccines and specialty medicines. One emphasis will be on exploring real-world data to inform the design of future Phase III clinical trials, to help make them more efficient and therefore reducing costs and patient burden. The partnership will also explore how emulated Phase IV trials could accelerate evidence generation for new indications of existing medicines, ultimately helping to bring effective treatments to patients more quickly.

For LSHTM members who are interested in learning more about working with a business through a KTP, please get in touch with Dr Alexandra Anderson.