Sharon Love, Associate Professor Clinical Trial Conduct

Sharon is a researcher in trial conduct, with an interest in clinical trial monitoring, using healthcare systems data for clinical trial outcomes, the conduct of platform trials and data sharing.

Clinical trial monitoring is an under researched area. Each group running clinical trials has created their own monitoring methods based on a limited amount of high-level guidance in ICH-type documents. As such it is difficult to communicate with each other to plan comparative research as we each have different processes. In the last 3 years, her monitoring outputs have been to create the basic foundations on which we can build monitoring research.

Less than 3% of trials access routine data. We are discovering each barrier and finding solutions. Recent work is around the integrity, provenance and utility of routine data.

Platform trials in later phase have been run for nearly 20 years. However, the operational skills to run these trials is contained in a few centres. Sharon is disseminating the experience in papers and talks to pass on this information to more centres.


Selected publications

Macey L Murray, Sharon B Love, James R Carpenter, Suzanne Hartley, Martin J Landray, Marion Mafham, Mahesh K B Parmar, Heather Pinches, Matthew R Sydes,on behalf of The Healthcare Systems Data for Clinical Trials Collaborative Group. "Data provenance and integrity of health-care systems data for clinical trials". The Lancet Digital Health (2022), 4,e567-e568 https://doi.org/10.1016/S2589-7500(22)00122-4

Sharon B. Love, Fay Cafferty, Claire Snowdon, Karen Carty, Joshua Savage, Philip Pallmann, Lucy McParland, Louise Brown, Lindsey Masters, Francesca Schiavone, Dominic Hague, Stephen Townsend, Claire Amos, Annabelle South, Kate Sturgeon, Ruth Langley, Timothy Maughan, Nicholas James, Emma Hall, Sarah Kernaghan, Judith Bliss, Nick Turner, Andrew Tutt, Christina Yap, Charlotte Firth, Anthony Kong, Hisham Mehanna, Colin Watts, Robert Hills, Ian Thomas, Mhairi Copland, Sue Bell, David Sebag‑Montefiore, Robert Jones, Mahesh K. B. Parmar and Matthew R. Sydes. "Practical guidance for running late‑phase platform protocols for clinical trials: lessons from experienced UK clinical trials units". Trials (2022) 23:757 https://doi.org/10.1186/s13063-022-06680-4

Sharon B Love; Victoria Yorke-Edwards; Elizabeth Ward; Rebecca Haydock; Katie Keen; Katie Biggs; Gosala Gopalakrishnan; Lucy Marsh; Lydia O'Sullivan; Lisa Fox; Estelle Payerne; Kerenza Hood; Garry Meakin. "What is the purpose of Clinical Trial Monitoring?" Trials (2022) 23:836 https://doi.org/10.1186/s13063-022-06763-2

Shao-Fan Hsieh, Victoria Yorke-Edwards, Macey L Murray, Carlos Diaz-Montana, Sharon B Love* and Matthew R Sydes* "Lack of transparent reporting of trial monitoring approaches in randomised controlled trials: A systematic review of contemporary protocol papers" Clinical Trials 2023; 20(2):121-132 DOI: 10.1177/17407745221143449 *Joint last authors

Victoria Yorke-Edwards, Carlos Diaz-Montana, Macey L Murray, Matthew R Sydes and Sharon B Love. "Monitoring metrics over time: Why clinical trialists need to systematically collect site performance metrics" Research Methods in Medicine & Health Sciences 2022, Vol. 0(0) 1–12 https://doi.org/10.1177/2632084322114785





Research Interests

  • Clinical trial monitoring
  • Healthcare systems data
  • Conduct of platform trials
  • Data sharing


Research Areas



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