Sean Ekins

In February 2011 Ekins began participating in the MM4TB project as part of Collaborative Drug Discovery led by Professor Stewart Cole.

Ekins co-developed a Wiki with Antony John Williams called Science Mobile Applications launched June 21, 2011. Initially this grew out of a desire to track chemistry Apps (for a paper submitted) and then Apps for science in the chemistry classroom.

In 2010 Sean Ekins was the co-author of seminal papers around data sharing and making pharmaceutical data more open. In these papers he opinions:

Since 2006 Ekins has consulted for several companies including on pharmacoeconomics and performing research on Tuberculosis Drug Discovery for Collaborative Drug Discovery.

Ekins has edited or co-edited 4 books for Wiley including: Computer Applications in Pharmaceutical Research and Development (2006), Computational Toxicology: Risk Assessment For Pharmaceutical and Environmental Chemicals(1007), Drug Efficacy, Safety, and Biologics Discovery(2009) and Collaborative Computational Technologies for Biomedical Research (2011) All the books have an underlying connection with computational technologies and their application for pharmaceutical R&D.

In 2005 he earned his D.Sc. in Science from the University of Aberdeen with a thesis entitled “Computational and in vitro models for predicting drug interactions in humans”.

In December 2001 he started work for a start-up company, Concurrent Pharmaceuticals (now Vitae Pharmaceuticals) as the Associate Director, Computational Drug Discovery. He was responsible for developing computational models for ADME/Tox and targets of interest. During this time he developed an interest in the polypharmacology of ADME/Tox proteins. In 2004 he joined GeneGo (now owned by Thomson Reuters) as Vice President, Computational Biology and developed the MetaDrug product (patent pending).

In late 1998 Ekins joined Pfizer and continued his interest in predicting drug-drug interactions and ADME properties. In 1999 he moved to Lilly to build a predictive ADME/Tox group. Between 1999 and late 2001 he generated pharmacophores and statistical models for various proteins including P-glycoprotein, PXR and enzymes.

From 1996-1998 Ekins continued his research as a Postdoc at Eli Lilly and Company laboratories characterizing the little-known CYP2B6 and applied computational methods to this enzyme. He collected drug-drug interaction Ki data for other P450s and generated pharmacophores. He created test sets to test the models, that were ultimately published. He published seminal ideas on how such models could be used to profile libraries of compounds for predicted drug-drug interactions.

Sean Ekins was born in Cleethorpes, England, on 2 March 1970 to John Ekins and Elsie May Ekins. He grew up in Grimsby. Ekins attended Edward Street Primary and Middle School followed by Havelock School. Ekins then earned his HND Science Applied Biology from Nottingham Trent University (formerly Polytechnic, 1988–1991), graduating in 1991, with a sandwich year (1989–1990) at the pharmaceutical company Servier in Fulmer, UK where his interest in drug discovery was established. Ekins then earned his M.Sc. in Clinical Pharmacology (1991–1992) at the University of Aberdeen with a dissertation entitled "Speculations on the relative roles of cytochrome P450 and flavin containing monooxygenase in the metabolism of S12363" he then earned a Ph.D. in clinical pharmacology, at the University of Aberdeen in 1996, funded by Servier, and wrote a thesis entitled “Maintenance and cryopreservation of xenobiotic metabolism in precision-cut liver slices. Evaluation of an alternative in vitro model to isolated hepatocytes”. During his PhD he developed an interest in predicting drug-drug interactions computationally as an alternative to using animal models.