Karaiskakio Foundation is a nonprofit organization established 25 years ago. Although its first mission was to establish a Volunteer Bone Marrow Donor Registry, with the vision “for a world without leukemia”, its dedication, moral values, and professionalism have contributed to the expansion of its spectrum of services.

It is now an accredited institution of highly sophisticated diagnostic laboratories providing free of charge services to all Cypriot patients with heamatological and other malignancies both effectively and efficiently. Karaiskakio Foundation has the biggest per capita volunteer Bone Marrow Donor Registry, with more than 185,000 registered donors out of which 35,000 are Turkish Cypriots.

Karaiskakio Foundation continued its journey of success by establishing in 2009, through EU Structural Funds, a state-of-the-art biomedical research center, focusing on the fields of haemato-oncology, oncology, and immunology, while providing scientific support to the continuing development of the diagnostic laboratories, thus ensuring the best possible services to the patients. Despite the financial constraints faced as a nonprofit organization, Karaiskakio Foundation is now among the best haemato-oncology diagnostic centers in the world.

This success would not be possible without a determined leadership, the dedication of the staff, the doctors and paramedics of the public hospitals, the support of the volunteer donors, the generous sponsors, and partners. Among its strategic objectives, in the last few years, was the establishment of a Childhood Cancer Diagnostic and Research Center which could not have been fulfilled without the sponsors’ contribution. The decision for the establishment of this Center was taken because child cancer is understudied, and it is one of the main causes of death for children under 15 years old. With a new vision “for a world full of children’s smiles” Karaiskakio Foundation set the objective to improve the oncologists’ treatment options by implementing the use of advanced personalized treatment protocols, which can reduce the morbidity and mortality of children and improve their quality of life after treatment.

Karaiskakio Foundation aspires to keep writing more success stories and with the support of its volunteers, sponsors, partners, and the Government to give examples of humanitarian actions, proving that a small country like Cyprus can indeed succeed much more than its size.