Competing interests: OLA declares personal fees from Gilead Sciences, Merck and GlaxoSmithKline outside the submitted work and receives funding from the NIHR Birmingham Biomedical Research Centre (BRC), NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (ARC), West Midlands, NIHR Birmingham-Oxford Blood and Transplant Research Unit (BTRU) in Precision Transplant and Cellular Therapeutics at the University of Birmingham and University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation, Innovate UK (part of UK Research and Innovation), Gilead Sciences, Merck and Sarcoma UK. PM and TW are employees of CPRD, the data custodians for CPRD Aurum. CPRD is jointly sponsored by the UK government’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency and the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). As a not-for-profit UK government body, CPRD seeks to recoup the cost of delivering its research services to academic, industry and government researchers through research user licence fees. SEH receives funding from the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (ARC), West Midlands and the NIHR Birmingham-Oxford Blood and Transplant Research Unit (BTRU) in Precision Transplant and Cellular Therapeutics at the University of Birmingham. SEH declares personal fees from Cochlear and Aparito outside the submitted work. CM receives funding from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Surgical Reconstruction and Microbiology Research Centre, the NIHR Birmingham-Oxford Blood and Transplant Research Unit (BTRU) in Precision Transplant and Cellular Therapeutics, Innovate UK, and has received personal fees from Aparito outside the submitted work. MC received personal fees from Astellas, Aparito, CIS Oncology, Takeda, Merck,Daiichi Sankyo, Glaukos, GSK and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) outside the submitted work. In addition, a family member owns shares in GSK. MC receives funding from the NIHR Birmingham Biomedical Research Centre, NIHR Surgical Reconstruction and Microbiology Research Centre, NIHR Birmingham-Oxford Blood and Transplant Research Unit (BTRU) in Precision Transplant and Cellular Therapeutics, and NIHR ARC West Midlands at the University of Birmingham and University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, Health Data Research UK, Innovate UK (part of UK Research and Innovation), Macmillan Cancer Support, European Regional Development Fund—Demand Hub, SPINE UK, UKRI, UCB Pharma, GSK and Gilead Sciences. All other authors declare no competing interests.