Overview
AspireCURES connects patients with eligible clinical trials, research studies, genetic testing, specialists, and advocacy opportunities — with a focus on rare white matter diseases and leukodystrophies. Its mission is summed up by the site's own tagline: “Aspire to do more. Aspire for a cure.” The site is fully self-hosted: a plain HTML/CSS/JS build served from Cloudflare Pages, with no framework, no build step, and no third-party platform runtime in the browser.
For rare-disease communities, the distance between a diagnosis and an actionable next step is enormous: trials are scattered, eligibility criteria are dense, and reliable disease information is hard to find in one place. The website is the organization's front door — it has to present each disease program clearly, route patients and caregivers toward registration, and stay trustworthy enough for researchers and clinicians to point people at.
My role
End-to-end ownership of the site across its whole life so far.
- Initial build — designed and built the organization's original launch site, establishing the information architecture, page templates, and visual identity.
- Replatform & independence — migrated the site off Squarespace onto Cloudflare Pages with custom Perl/Bash mirror-and-customize tooling, then removed the platform runtime entirely: all interactivity now runs from small vanilla-JS modules, imagery is locally served WebP, and the content security policy is tightened to first-party + analytics only.
- Serverless registration — replaced the platform form with a Cloudflare Pages Function that backs up every submission to Cloudflare KV and creates a lead in Zoho CRM before handing the visitor to a thank-you page.
- Automated research feed — a twice-weekly GitHub Action pulls new papers (Europe PMC, PubMed) and trials (ClinicalTrials.gov), has an AI reviewer vet and summarize each item, and renders the results into the eight disease pages.
- Content & upkeep — ongoing maintenance: writing and updating disease-program pages, keeping trial and registration information current, and expanding the site as new programs come online.
Site structure
The site is organized around disease-specific program pages, each pairing plain-language disease information with the research and trial-matching opportunities relevant to that community.
- Program pages — dedicated pages for AARS1/AARS2, CSF1R-ALSP, CSF1R-BANDDOS, Alzheimer's disease, Lewy body dementia, Nasu-Hakola disease, frontotemporal dementia, and multiple sclerosis.
-
Registration flow — a static form posting to a serverless
/api/registerendpoint that routes patients and caregivers into the matching process with a personalized, patient-centered approach. - Trust & compliance — hand-rolled, consent-gated analytics and a clear cookie policy, appropriate for a health-adjacent audience.
Content & upkeep
A site like this is never "done" — programs are added as new research partnerships form, and existing pages need revisiting as trial availability changes. The automated research feed carries the heaviest part of that load: new publications and trials land on the disease pages twice a week without manual editing. The rest of the ongoing work is editorial as much as technical: keeping disease descriptions accurate and readable for families who may have just received a diagnosis, while staying precise enough to be useful to clinicians. This project overlaps with my broader involvement in the rare-disease advocacy space alongside the Sisters Hope Foundation.
Links
Visit the live site.