Mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Priscilla Chan
More than a year after Facebook CEO and Cofounder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician Dr. Priscilla Chan, set up a philanthropy to support healthcare, social justice and other issues, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has acquired Toronto-Canada-based startup, Meta. The goal of the business is to harness artificial intelligence to improve the speed at which scientists and clinicians gain access to research relevant to them.
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Through partnerships with publishers of scientific journals, Meta created a tool that is used by 1,200 institutes, according to a blog entry on the company’s website. Meta seeks to address a challenge faced by the life science community and others: How to adequately wrap their arms around the articles that they need to read and prioritize them.
Meta developed software to analyze and connect insights across millions of papers, according to a description of the company on Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Facebook page. Founded by Sam Molyneux —a former University of Toronto cancer genomics researcher — the company’s platform seeks out the most relevant or impactful studies in a scientific area as soon as they are published and identifies patterns in the content on a huge scale.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative described Meta’s potential this way:
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.
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Meta will work with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to convert Meta’s platform into a tool available to the scientific community, according to a news release from Meta investor IGan Partners.
The dilemma of how to improve access to clinical research in a way that is timely and efficient is one that has occupied the interest of researchers and companies from IBM Watson Health to Flatiron Health, particularly in the realm of oncology. Another company addressing this need that’s somewhat similar to Meta but with a focus on antibodies is BenchSci.
In September last year, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative allocated $600 million for a joint venture by University of California Berkeley, University of California San Francisco and Stanford University for a new medical science research center called the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub.
The aim of the Biohub is to facilitate collaboration between researchers at the universities. One research project the Biohub supports is a Cell Atlas — a map for researchers around the world that will show how many different types of cells control the body’s major organs function, according to UC Berkeley’s website. An Infectious Disease Initiative is intended to explore new ways to create drugs, diagnostic tests and vaccines against infectious diseases such as HIV, Ebola and Zika.
Photo: Chan Zuckerberg Initiative