In 2004 he joined GeneGo (now owned by Thomson Reuters) as vice president, Computational Biology and developed the MetaDrug product (patent pending). 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". From 2006-2016 Ekins consulted for several companies including for Collaborative Drug Discovery. In 2011 Ekins Co-Founded Phoenix Nest working on treatments for Sanfilippo Syndrome. In 2015, Ekins founded Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, a privately owned company that performs research and development on innovative therapeutics for multiple rare and infectious diseases. Collaborations Pharmaceuticals partners with academics and companies to identify and translate early preclinical to clinical stage assets. Ekins has also carried out independent research and collaborative research on topics including pharmacophores for drug transporters, cheminformatics for predicting immunoassay cross reactivity, models for studying nuclear receptor-ligand co-evolution, computational models for PXR agonists and antagonists as well as analyses of large datasets and crowdsourcing data. Making Pharmaceutical Data Open In 2010 Sean Ekins was the co-author of seminal papers around data sharing and making pharmaceutical data more open publishing papers: 1. on the long overdue need for making preclinical ADME/Tox data precompetitive 2. how crowdsourcing could be used in the pharmaceutical industry 3. how computational models for pharmacoeconomics could be shared by the scientific community 4. what tools are still needed in cheminformatics and how methods for model sharing will be important 5. How pharmaceutical companies could use open source molecular descriptors and algorithms which would facilitate computational model sharing with the academic and neglected disease community This work is important because it was the first prominent advocacy for making a broad array of approaches to make preclinical and postmarketing data and models available as well as the demonstration of the feasibility of such approaches. Ekins served on the advisory group for ChemSpider and provided an array of pharmaceutical data sets to the database to make it available to the community. Tuberculosis and Malaria Research While working for Collaborative Drug Discovery, (funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) he analyzed data provided to the public domain by the pharmaceutical industry. Specifically this was malaria screening data from GlaxoSmithKline for over 13,000 compounds. As a result of this work an important caution was provided to the scientific community in accepting such data at face value. These data were compared to other malaria and tuberculosis