There are already really highly qualified people answering questions on Quora, but I think niche platofrms for matters as serious as this are beneficial.
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@shousri
What about expert outsiders?
While the current most prominent case[1] in the media of an expert outsider and cancer research is Dr. David Sanders, Dr. Sanders 1.0 's involvement in cancer research is far more unusual than the typical expert outsider. Retraction-watching, correct experimental procedure and p-hacking aside, computational, ai, and big data techniques are making their way into cancer researcher (and treatment). A person who studies neural networks might be more useful in discussion of elements of diagnostics, irrespective of the data source (as long as the data is properly marked up). But they may not be typical bioinformatics people (they may be just straight cs or math people). What is your plan/goal with these people?
What of patients? while most patients are not necessarily into research discussions, there is a minority who are (and with some very rare cancers, I'd assume a much larger than a minority due to #clinicaltrialpoolproblems). I already know of at least one BRCA/breast-ovarian-prostate-pancreatic article reading group which has a mixture of academic studies and lighter fair, and also has a mix of doctors-researchers, drug/genetic testing researchers/reps, advocates, and patients (and is run by a patient). While I am not sure every patient should be in this, there are patients who read pubmed and getting a lift up might be helpful.
[1] See https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/...http://retractionwatch.com/2017/...
(full disclosure: I was fairly close with his oldest son while we were in college, who fairly recently got a doctorate of his own, and therefore he's Dr. Sanders 2.0.)
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