diff --git a/.gitignore b/.gitignore
index 8a38644..d704caa 100644
--- a/.gitignore
+++ b/.gitignore
@@ -134,3 +134,4 @@ dmypy.json
 data/*
 embeddings/*
 results/*
+models/*
diff --git a/backend/my_executors.py b/backend/my_executors.py
index ee15566..4bc0ca9 100644
--- a/backend/my_executors.py
+++ b/backend/my_executors.py
@@ -7,7 +7,7 @@
 from transformers import BertModel, BertTokenizer
 from jina import Executor, requests, Document, DocumentArray
 
-from backend_config import top_k, embeddings_path 
+from backend_config import top_k, embeddings_path
 from utils import partition
 from helpers import log
 
@@ -19,12 +19,17 @@ def __init__(self, **kwargs):
         log("Initialising ProtBertExecutor.")
         super().__init__()
 
+        model_path = "../models/prot_bert"
+        if not os.path.exists(model_path):
+            log(f"Downloading model {model_path}.")
+            model_path = "Rostlab/prot_bert"
+        else:
+            log(f"Using local model: {model_path}")
+            
         log("Setting tokenizer.")
-        tokenizer = BertTokenizer.from_pretrained(
-            "Rostlab/prot_bert", do_lower_case=False
-        )
+        tokenizer = BertTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_path, do_lower_case=False)
         log("Setting model.")
-        model = BertModel.from_pretrained("Rostlab/prot_bert")
+        model = BertModel.from_pretrained(model_path)
 
         self.tokenizer = tokenizer
         self.model = model