Gemma Turon

Trained as a molecular biologist, Gemma completed a PhD in colorectal cancer and stem cells at IRB Barcelona in 2019, before taking a one-year break to focus on working and volunteering in the third sector. This shifted her scientific interest to global health and neglected diseases, and the existing barriers to tackle some of the most urgent health issues in developing countries. Working within Ersilia, an Open Source Initiative with the mission to equip laboratories and universities in low resource areas with AI tools for infectious disease research, she aims to explore new ways of community building and engagement in the scientific arena, at the intersection between academia, biotech start-ups and NPOs.

Ersilia, a hub of open-source AI/ML models for drug discovery and global health

The Ersilia Open Source Initiative is a non-profit organization with the mission to equip laboratories and universities in low resource areas with AI tools for infectious disease research. Ersilia has developed a set of AI-based tools to support medicinal chemistry, parasitology and ADME experimental pipelines, offering them via a unified, open source platform the Ersilia Model Hub. With it, scientists can easily browse, select and run AI models to accelerate their drug discovery pipelines. In this talk, we will present our computational methods and infrastructure and their application to the discovery of new treatments for infectious diseases.