Ersilia

Ersilia is a technology nonprofit that builds open source AI tooling for drug discovery, with a stated focus on infectious and neglected tropical diseases affecting the Global South. Its central piece of software is the Ersilia Model Hub, a growing collection of ready to use machine learning models for antimicrobial and small molecule research that a scientist can browse, pull and run on their own machine without assembling the underlying code themselves. The audience is chemists, biologists and computational researchers working in laboratories with limited data science infrastructure. The hub browser filters models by subtask, covering property prediction, activity, featurization, projection, similarity and molecular generation, as well as by organism and disease, and each entry links back to its publication. Models are packaged so they run reproducibly on local hardware, and the project publishes documentation, code and community channels for contributors. Around the software, Ersilia runs an incubator that supports students, early career researchers and principal investigators on live projects, sets up data science units inside drug discovery centers in Africa and other low and middle income regions, and holds capacity building workshops for chemists and biologists. There is no pricing. The software is open source and free to use, and the organization is a registered nonprofit funded by partnerships and donations; the main call to action on its site is to contribute code, time or funding rather than to buy anything. One thing to weigh before adopting it: this is a nonprofit research initiative rather than a commercial vendor. Development and support come from a small core team plus volunteer contributors, so there is no support contract or commercial roadmap behind the model hub.