Mark Zuckerberg's charity is buying a search engine for research papers

Mark Zuckerberg's massive philanthropic organization just laid out the next step in its quest to cure or manage all diseases.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is buying a startup called Meta, which uses artificial intelligence to scan and index research papers in a way that makes them easier for scientists to find.

The group plans to build on Meta's existing product and eventually offer the search engine for free, according to a Facebook post announcing the sale.

The terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

The Toronto-based startup's co-founders have said their goal is to make the service the “plumbing” of medical and academic research access. They claim the company's algorithms can parse study authors and subject matter to prioritize more important papers, as well as build information feeds that adapt to an individual's searching habits.

"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," Cori Bargmann, the initiative's president of science, and Brian Pinkerton, its chief technology officer, wrote in the post.

The initiative is able to buy for-profit businesses like Meta because it's set up as a limited-liability company rather than a nonprofit, a structure Zuckerberg claimed would give it more flexibility in how it spends money.

Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have pledged 99 percent of their family's Facebook shares -- currently worth around $45 billion -- to the philanthropic effort. Last fall, the couple announced that $3 billion of that donation would go towards a mission to cure or manage all diseases over the course of the next decade.