Yes, we founded in 2010. It was difficult because of lack of resources and so on so we’ve been trying to raise some funds. We haven’t had much success yet. We have faculty within the university that are part of the centre where we just finished a big epidemiological study in collaboration with universities in the United States. So we’re actually looking for collaborations, ways to get funding. We have a bad economic situation right now so we would like to go out of Cyprus and search for funding elsewhere through collaboration.

How do you network and start collaborations with other institutes?

You try to go to meetings like the National Cancer Institute Directors Meeting to meet people and network, exchange ideas, show what research you’ve done, see if other people are interested in. So we’re actually interested in expanding our epidemiologic studies on cancer so hopefully we’ll make some collaborations. Actually at the meeting here I’ve met a lot of people.

What are the differences in epidemiology in Cyprus?

One interesting thing is that we actually have lower rates of cancer incidence compared to other European countries. We don’t know why that is so that’s something to investigate. We have lower lung cancer incidence compared to other European countries, even though smoking…

Because you haven’t been smoking long enough.

Well there are actually over 30% of men are smoking and yet the lung cancer rates are half of other countries.

But for how long have they been smoking?

For quite a lot. We have to look into that into a lot more detail but this is something also that needs to be sorted out. And also we have an increase in thyroid cancer that we would like to investigate further. Again we don’t know the reasons for that, it could be over-diagnosis but it could also be exposure to some form of radiation that we don’t know.

We use the cancer registry from the Ministry of Health so it actually was a good initial study to give us ideas on what to continue and so on.