Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to (Our startup) DistilBio, a search engine for life sciences data
Link: http://www.distilbio.com DistilBio lets you look up detailed information on drugs, diseases, proteins etc. You can ask questions like "Find drugs which interact with Tylenol, and proteins which are targeted by these drugs", or build more complex queries if you like. While it is targeted at scientists in the life sciences field, we've found that many people like finding out more about drugs they're using, diseases they know about etc. We're continuing to add more data and make it more useful for the layman too. We thought we'd like to show our app to HN users and solicit feedback before…
DistilBio is a search engine for life sciences data that lets users look up information on drugs, diseases, and proteins. Users can perform simple lookups or build complex queries, such as finding drugs that interact… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. (Our startup) DistilBio, a search engine for life sciences data launched in 2012; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1MA
Muler is a Flask app that allows users to search for pharmacological information by generic or proprietary drug names.
2021 · muler.pythonanywhere.com · its alternatives →
- 2

Hi HN - we’re the founders of Ligo Biosciences and are excited to share an open-source implementation of AlphaFold3, the frontier model for protein structure prediction. Google DeepMind and their new startup Isomorphic Labs, are expanding into drug discovery. They developed AlphaFold3 as their model to accelerate drug discovery and create demand from big pharma. They already signed Novartis and Eli Lilly for $3 billion - Google’s becoming a pharma company! (https://www.isomorphiclabs.com/articles/isomorphic-labs-kick...) AlphaFold3 is a biomolecular structure prediction…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3

Hi HN, As a researcher, I often found myself struggling with the limitations of keyword-based search when exploring PubMed papers. To address this, I created PubMed Search (https://www.pubmedisearch.com/), a tool that leverages a vector database to enable semantic search across medical research literature. Some key features: * Daily updates to ensure access to the latest articles * Semantic search using latest & greatest embedding models * Some additional useful info about the papers (tldr, journal, publication date, etc.) Hope you find it useful!
2024 · pubmedisearch.com · its alternatives →
- 4

When I read papers, I have to jump between multiple tabs to find the dataset, code, videos, peer reviews, and so on. I tried to fix this with this project. It started as a project just for papers on arXiv, but after its initial success on Twitter (got like 1.9k views: the most I have gotten for a post), I have now expanded it to include other openly available papers from PubMed Central, bioRxiv, medRxiv, and eLife. These papers have been linked with their genes, proteins, diseases, drugs, clinical trials, 3D protein structures, code, and cited and similar papers. This project now has four…
Jul 2026 · tomesphere.com · its alternatives →
- 5
PharmaRXhub▲50Easily find medications, compare prices, and save time.
2025 · pharmarxhub.com · its alternatives →
- 6

Hey HN! This has been my project for a few years now. I recently brought it back to life after taking a pause to focus on my studies. My goal with this project is to separate fluff from science when shopping for supplements. I am doing this in 3 steps: 1.) I index every supplement on the market (extract each ingredient, normalize by quantity) 2.) I index every research paper on supplementation (rank every claim by effect type and effect size) 3.) I link data between supplements and research papers Earlier last year, I took pause on a project because I've ran into a few issues: Legal: Shady…
Jan 2026 · pillser.com · its alternatives →
- 7

We are super excited to release our latest open-source demo, Healthsearch. This demo decodes user reviews of supplements and performs semantic- and generative search on them, retrieving the most related products for specific health effects, and leveraging Large Language Models to generate product and review summaries. The demo can understand natural language queries and derive all search filters directly from the context of your query.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8

Hi there, Burak here. I built an open-source data copy tool called ingestr (https://github.com/bruin-data/ingestr) I did build quite a few data warehouses both for the companies I worked at, as well as for consultancy projects. One of the more common pain points I observed was that everyone had to rebuild the same data ingestion bit over and over again, and each in different ways: - some wrote code for the ingestion from scratch to various degrees - some used off-the-shelf data ingestion tools like Fivetran / Airbyte I have always disliked both of these approaches,…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9IW
I made a table where you can find out the source/location of factory for where health supplements are made. Then, I spent a year reading product labels so you can save time and money when buying supplements. This is that update. This is still a work in progress but it functions fine. My previous post was a simple database of company data showing ingredient sourcing/location. That took 10 days, this has taken me close to 9 months. BackOfLabel is an extension of that initial interest with dosage information at the product & ingredient level. This update allows sorting by many more…
2023 · backoflabel.com · its alternatives →
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- 11NN
Jun 2026 · nutrepedia.com · its alternatives →
- 12

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2014 · coredemia.com · its alternatives →
- 14

Hi this is a work in progress but it works to determine supplement efficacy for 500 conditions at the moment. Things you can do: - search for a condition -> find which supplements are effective -> see which studies indicate they are effective -> read individual study summaries - search for a supplement -> see effectiveness table, dosing, safety, dietary sources, mechanisms of action (+ browse all original sources) let me know what you think
Mar 2026 · supplementdex.com · its alternatives →
- 15DC
Hey HN, I've built a little website to show news articles with a summary so that I don't have to RTFA if I just want a rough sense of what it covers :) I also share the summaries in an RSS feed for those who'd prefer to use their own reader. Let me know what you think!
2022 · distilhn.com · its alternatives →
- 16

I made a web game inspired by Geoguessr and Wordle, where you get shown a 3D model of a random human protein each day, and you have to triangulate its gene name using similarity clues. My background is in wet lab molecular biology and I intend this game to be engaging mostly to other biologists. But if you're outside the field, I'm interested to know if you can still solve it with browser use LLMs, and if you learned something interesting doing so. Let me know what you think. I made it with Claude over the last 2 months. My coding experience is limited to basic python data analysis and…
Dec 2025 · geneguessr.brinedew.bio · its alternatives →
- 17
MediSearch▲65Get an instant answer to your medical questions
2023 · medisearch.io · its alternatives →
- 18AF
I have some chronic medical conditions, and spend a lot of time asking about different drugs and supplements. Wanted to create a resource that others might get value from. It's trained to always provide citations, and to urge people to see their doctor before making major decisions. Open for feedback.
2024 · agenthost.ai · its alternatives →
- 19

2021 · chrome.google.com · its alternatives →
- 20

Easy access to reliable drug information
2020 · synapse-medicine.com · its alternatives →
- 21AT
Hello community. Some time ago I was trying to create a project for my students using Hacker News data. As you might know, HN offers an official API [0], but it's based on Firebase and I felt it's main usage is to build clients, rather than consult data. I found out that Algolia also provides an official REST API [1]. It's exactly what I needed: the ability to "search" HN. Either by keywords, type of stories (Show HN, Ask HN, etc) and/or date. So I created a thin python wrapper on top of Algolia's Search API: https://github.com/santiagobasulto/python-hacker-news The…
2019 · its alternatives →
- 22DA
2021 · docone.io · its alternatives →
- 23

I started this trying to understand two things: why my Asian friends turn red after drinking, and why several friends all seemed to have migraine clusters. I was reading medical papers and textbooks, but kept getting lost jumping between topics. I thought: what if I could just Cmd+Click through this like code? What if "ALDH2 gene" was actually clickable, and took me to the variant, the phenotype, the population frequencies? So I started modeling human biology in Rust with my Ralph agent (Claude in a loop, ty ghuntley). Turns out the type system is perfect for this. Every biological entity is…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24IB
I've been working on nodes.bio - an interactive tool for visualizing biological networks and systems thinking. The tool features interactive network visualization powered by Cytoscape.js, with real-time graph editing and manipulation capabilities. It supports JSON import/export and provides a responsive design that works seamlessly on the desktop (mobile-friendly version coming later). The tech stack combines modern frontend technologies with robust backend architecture. The frontend uses Next.js 14 with TypeScript and Cytoscape.js for the visualization engine. The backend is built with…
2025 · nodes.bio · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Muler, a search engine for drug info built with Flask alternatives
- An open-source implementation of AlphaFold3 alternatives
- I put PubMed in a vector DB alternatives
- I mapped 8.5M research papers into an interactive atlas alternatives
- PharmaRXhub alternatives
- I've been using AI to analyze every supplement on the market alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →