ideasIdea
Living plain-language evidence summaries for every common cancer question in 20 languages
For each question patients actually ask, keep a short, current, sourced answer in plain words, updated as evidence changes and available in the languages people speak.
Trustworthy information exists (NCI PDQ, Cancer Research UK, Cochrane plain summaries) but is fragmented, slow to update and mostly English. The proposal is a living library: a defined set of the several thousand most-asked questions, each with a plain answer drafted with language-model assistance from guidelines and systematic reviews, reviewed and signed by named experts, versioned, translated and re-checked on a schedule, with open licensing so clinics, platforms and assistants can embed it.
Hypothesis
The library becomes the most-cited source in assistant answers and platform labels for cancer questions and reduces measured misinformation belief in populations exposed to it.
Rationale
Misinformation fills the vacuum left by absent, outdated or unreadable good information; the marginal cost of maintaining answers has fallen with drafting tools while expert review keeps quality.
What would test it
Build 1,000 questions in five languages; measure usage, citation in assistant outputs, and knowledge in surveyed patients versus controls.
Maturity
early clinical
Who has to act
data
Cost to try
Medium ($1M to $50M)
Years to first evidence
2
Bottlenecks it attacks
- Misinformation and unproven therapies · Patients are sold unproven treatments and frightened away from proven ones.
- Knowledge reaches practice too slowly · Knowledge diffusion is slow: it takes years for a proven result to change what most patients receive, and no one can keep up with the literature.