About the CoE 

The Biobank was created as a result of external competitive funding secured by Prof. C. Deltas and his colleagues, in the form of an infrastructure Strategic Program. The program was co-funded by the Regional Development Fund of the European Union and the Republic of Cyprus through the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation, with a total of €2mi and included the creation of the first Biobank in the country. This project was ranked first among 42 applications, in a 2-phase procedure. The Biobank was approved by the Cyprus National Bioethics Committee in 2011 to operate for the next 25 years.

In a joint partnership with the Medical University of Graz, the European Biobanking consortium BBMRI-ERIC, and the research company RTD Talos, the Molecular Medicine Center of the University of Cyprus successfully applied to the European Commission program scheme H2020-WIDESPREAD-01-2018-2019: Teaming Phase 2 and was awarded €15 million in order to further its research capacity and upgrade its medical biobanking infrastructure to match European standards.  The project is entitled:

Biobanking and the Cyprus Human Genome Project (CY-Biobank)

It is supplemented by another €15 million by the Government of Cyprus and another €8 million by the University of Cyprus for a duration of 15 years, October 1, 2019 to September 30, 2034. Amongst the objectives of the new funding is the enhancement of the biobanking activity in terms of numbers of donors and disease conditions to serve. At the same time, it is of paramount importance to implement and maintain quality management measures in order to attract interested parties to exploit the banked data and material and secure trust to research results. To this end, the quality management of the Biobank is working on satisfying the requirements for ISO 9001 and ISO 20387.

Further development of the Biobank came with the success in funding by the European Commission in the framework of program H2020-WIDESPREAD-01-2018-2019: Teaming Phase 2, for €15mi for 7 years. The project is entitled: Biobanking and the Cyprus Human Genome Project. The project is supplemented by another €15mi by the Government of Cyprus and another €8mi by the University of Cyprus for a duration of 15 years, October 1, 2019 to September 30, 2034. It aims to upgrade the current infrastructure into a Center of Excellence in Biobanking and Biomedical Research.