| Client | Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute |
|---|---|
| UN SDGs | 03 Good Health And Well-Being 04 Quality Education 17 Partnerships For The Goals |
| Impact | United Kingdom |
| Technologies | PHP, MySQL, API |
The Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute is a world-leading cancer research institute, part of the University of Cambridge, dedicated to improving patients' lives through discovery science. Its work spans research themes from artificial intelligence and cancer detection to personalised medicine, and its community includes researchers, academics, students, partners, and collaborators around the world.
The Institute needed a new website that could do two demanding jobs at once: make an enormous amount of complex information easy to navigate for very different audiences, and tell the human story behind the science - the purpose, culture, and sense of belonging that draws world-class talent to a place that can't compete on commercial salaries.
The design, brand interpretation, information architecture, and narrative-led approach were led by our design partner Luminous Industries. We took on everything technical: turning that vision into a fast, secure, accessible website built to last.
We built the site as a custom WordPress theme using ACF (Advanced Custom Fields), giving the Institute a flexible system of templates and components that could hold a vast range of content while staying faithful to the designed layouts. The result is a site their team can maintain and grow easily, without needing to touch code to keep it current.
A major part of the work was migration. The Institute had a huge volume of existing content built up over many years, serving multiple audiences, all of which needed to move across cleanly and land in the right place within the new, clearer structure.
The most technically involved piece was integrating the Institute's research publications. Rather than maintaining these by hand, the site pulls them in automatically from an external publications feed over an API, so the Institute's research record stays current on its own. Delivering this reliably meant solving several problems together: securing the publication feed so data could be pulled safely through the firewall, setting up scheduled cron jobs to keep everything refreshing on time, and adapting the incoming data to fit the designed layouts so it looked native to the site rather than bolted on.
The new website gives the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute a clear, confident home for its research that works hard behind the scenes. It handles high volumes of traffic comfortably, keeps its publication record up to date automatically, and is straightforward for the Institute's own team to maintain.
It has been well received by the researchers it was built for - easy to navigate, faithful to the design, and dependable at scale. Paired with the design-led storytelling, the build helps the Institute do something important: make world-class science easy to find, understand, and connect with.