An Introduction to Generative Drug Discovery

Sean Ekins is founder and CEO of Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (CPI) which is focused on using machine learning approaches for rare and neglected disease drug discovery. Sean graduated from the University of Aberdeen, receiving his M.Sc., Ph.D. in Clinical Pharmacology and D.Sc. in Science. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Eli Lilly, before working as a senior scientist at Pfizer and then returning to Eli Lilly. He went on to join several startup companies at increasingly senior levels. Since 2005 he has been awarded numerous grants as PI for a wide array of start-up companies totaling over $12.2M as well as performing as a consultant on others. Since 2016 he has additionally won over 20 additional grants from NIH and DOD (STTR/SBIR grants, R21, UH2 and R01) totaling over $21.2M for CPI. He has a passion for advancing new technologies for drug discovery and is a prolific collaborator. He has authored or co-authored over 370 peer reviewed papers, book chapters, edited 5 books on different aspects of drug discovery research and topics and written one book on winning grants. Coverage of his recent research has also appeared in the Economist, Financial Times, Washington Post, Wired, Scientific American, CNN and Netflix as well as several podcasts. When he is not writing he enjoys cycling and record collecting.