Chan Zuckerberg Initiative acquires Toronto-based AI startup

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative — which is founded by Facebook CEO and cofounder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician Dr. Priscilla Chan — has acquired Toronto-based Meta with the idea to harness artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the speed at which scientists and clinicians gain access to relevant research. Terms of the deal were not revealed.

Meta has worked with publishers of scientific journals to create a tool that is currently used by 1,200 institutes. The company’s software analyzes and connects insights across millions of papers, and is able to seek out the most relevant or impactful studies as soon as they are published and identify patterns in the content on a huge scale.

Meta’s tools can dramatically accelerate scientific progress and move us closer to our goal: to support science and technology that will make it possible to cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of the century. Meta will help scientists learn from others’ discoveries in real time, find key papers that may have gone unnoticed, or even predict where their field is headed.

Together with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Meta will work to make its platform available to the wider scientific community.

Of course, Meta is by no means the only company in this space, with IBM’s Watson division arguably leading the pack in its efforts to make sense of all the various clinical research data. Also, there are many other players all of which want to bring Big Data to a doctor near you. Or, if that’s useful, make it available to the end user.

Last year, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative teamed-up with University of California Berkeley, University of California San Francisco and Stanford University to setup a new medical science research center called the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub.