The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropy organization set up by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) and his wife Priscilla Chan, has acquired Meta Inc., a search engine that uses artificial intelligence to index and find insights across millions of scientific research papers.

Founded in 2010, Meta aims to unlock scientific knowledge and accelerate the pace of discovery by allowing scientists to search, read and tie together more than 26 million science research papers. While that might not sound very exciting as a concept, CZI President of Science Cori Bargmann and Chief Technology Officer Brian Pinkerton explained in a Facebook post:

In the field of biomedicine alone, researchers publish more than 4,000 scientific papers every day. But many of these papers will not be read by the scientists who could learn the most from them. Scientists know that existing search tools can’t capture all of the relevant knowledge in this immense volume of scientific research. Meta is a tool that helps fill that gap.

Using AI, the search engine can analyze and connect insights across papers as they are published, finding what they describe as “patterns in the literature” on a scale that a humble human being would be unable to discover — in theory, delivering insights and connections between various forms of research.

“The potential for this kind of platform is virtually limitless,” Bargmann and Pinkerton added. “A researcher could use Meta to help identify emerging techniques for understanding coronary artery disease; a graduate student could see that two different diseases activate the same immune defense pathway; and clinicians could find scientists working on the most promising Zika treatments sooner. In the long run, it could be extended to other areas of knowledge: for example, it could help educators stay up to date on developmental science to better understand how children learn.”

Meta’s is CZI’s first acquisition since it was founded last year with a goal to fund medical initiatives to cure, prevent or manage all known diseases by the end of the century. The initiative said it will make the Meta service free for all researchers to use globally.

Image credit: tech_eu/Flickr/CC by 2.0