Study on Covid-19 antibodies introduces biobank.cy to a wider audience

Greetings from a blossoming Cyprus, as the sunshine returns to signal the beginning of the spring season!

Despite the Covid-19 restrictions of December-March, our team of staff at biobank.cy has kept itself busy with a number of activities and projects.

Especially, the Covid-19 project tracking antibodies within the population residing in Cyprus, continues to attract great visibility and interest among our compatriots. We have already exceeded 700 donations and we continue to receive applications through phone calls and e-mails on a daily basis. We are now working on arranging a visit to Paphos, to take place sometime within the month of April, in order to expand our sample reach.

In a similar fashion we had arranged appointments and carried out sample taking in Limassol on 7 separate occasions over the month of March alone. In the meantime, the project consortium consisting of our CoE, the University of Cyprus Medical School, the School of Medicine of the University of Nicosia and the Department of Health Sciences of the European University of Cyprus, received a donation from the Embassy of China in Nicosia and the Cyprus Volunteer Doctor Association.  For more info on the project please click on the following link: https://biobank.cy/research/covid-19-antibody-research/  .

The biobank.cy website has been receiving tens of hits on a daily basis, guiding and encouraging our visitors to apply for the Covid-19 antibody project as well as our announcements and new job vacancies that we recently opened. So far, the website has attracted approximately 5,400 viewers (see below), since September 14 that it was launched, edging closer and closer to meeting our yearly target of 8,000 visitors per year.

Moreover, in the context of honouring the World Kidney Day on March 11^th, Paphos-based nephrologist Dr Christophoros Stavrou and our Senior Scientist and Member of the Academic Council Dr Gregory Papagregoriou, along with Professor Deltas appeared on radio and television interviews regarding the rare renal disease Mucin-1, for which our CoE is carrying out a dedicated research. The interviews were quite informative and subsequently were picked up by other online news portals and Media (for the Greek speakers, please lick on the following link:

https://biobank.cy/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/5-7.pdf .

New Biobanking campaign with the Cyprus military to be launched during the summer 2021

Meanwhile, we are excited to inform you that a delegation spearheaded by Professor Deltas met last month with a group of delegates from the Cyprus Ministry of Defence, in order to push forward for the soon-to-be-inaugurated collaboration between the Cyprus military and biobank.cy, which aims to recruit military staff and conscripts to the island-wider volunteer donors’ campaign of our Center. The collaboration is scheduled to be launched in early summer, provided that approval is obtained by the Cyprus National Bioethics Committee, which is grouping all members of the military as a vulnerable population group. Currently we are in the process of ensuring the necessary logistics and procedures that need to be in place in order to turn this endeavor into a successful collaboration.

Finally, our CoE team continues to grow, as biobank.cy announces in March 2021 five more job vacancies, the deadline of which expires on April 30. These vacancies include two positions for Biobank Technologists, one for a System Administrator, one for a Bioinformatics Officer and one for a Data Analyst. For those of you who are interested in applying, please click on the following link: https://biobank.cy/vacancies/ .