It's interesting that OP did seemingy little research with respect to existing work in the field.

https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medline/medline_overview.html

Medline, a searchable online directory of medical research papers has existed for 50 years. The National Library of Medicine for many years was a leader in document search and retrieval before there was a web. In the 80's they were doing vector cosine document similarity, document clustering and automated classifcation. They were also doing so great stuff like indexing papers based on proteins and gene sequences - so a paper which might be in a field completely different than yours might pop up if a similar protein or sequence was mentioned.

(Disclosure - I worked at the National Library of Medicine in the 90's)

That being said, in the past 30 years search and retrieval exploded to say nothing of ML, but its crazy to ignore the stuff which has come before, AND it's tough to compete with a national lab whose mandate is to basically give the stuff away.