The EPOS-Iasis R&D pathways scheme, specifically designed with suitable office space for the researchers and the administrative staff, as well as with space for the SME’ various laboratories. The SME’s physical facilities are designed to provide state-of-the-art functionality for research, as well as create a welcoming and stimulating atmosphere that promotes innovation, creativity, learning, teamwork, and professional service, all in an efficient and sustainable manner. They were also designed to ensure flexibility and modularity as research needs and methods change and evolve over time.

EPOS established the first Nanobiotechnology laboratory and Translational Nanomedicine lab in Cyprus, equipped with-state-of-the-art tissue culture and histopathology facilities, including an O2-sensed incubator for cancer stem cell cultures under hypoxia conditions, centrifuges, protein and nucleic acid analysis systems, advanced cell imaging systems for fluoresence resonance transfer energy (FRET), light microscopes and an inverted fluorescent NIR microscope equipped with CCD digital camera, cryopreservation units, an immunoistochemistry platform and is in the process of obtaining a state-of-the-art benchtop bioreactor. An in-house electrospinning unit, suitable for both mono-axial and co-axial prototypes provides all required nanomembrane meshes for tissue engineering and three-dimensional tumour models. For functionalisation of nanomembrane scaffolds the company has access, either via collaboration or via contractual agreements to state-of-the art synthetic facilities including inert atmosphere techniques, a modern single crystal CCD X-ray machine, elemental analyzer, luminescence and time resolved luminescence spectrometers, FT-IR, UV-Vis, spectrometers and potentiostats.

EPOS has complete access to Hephaistos MC-Chair of Nanomanufacturing state-of-the-art laboratory facilities including the Micro-& Nano-Systems Lab, Manufacturing Eng. Lab, Advanced Materials Characterization Lab and Biomedical Eng. Lab. Among related instruments, nanofabrication equipment to be used in this project includes a nanofiber electrospinning system (Gamma High Voltage supply, KDS microdialysis pump, heated magnetic stirrer), ultrasonic welders (Branson, Stapla), Laser microcutter (Signatone), RP 3D printer, CNC milling station (Haas) and other machining facilities. Analytical infrastructure in this project includes a SEM (Tescan) (AFM/EFM/MFM (Quesant), STM (NanoSurf), white light profilometer (Ambios), FTIR (Jasco) and Raman spectrometers (Ocean Optics), Laser acoustic system (LA Wave), DMA instrument (Triton), EDX microanalysis (PGT), XRD analysis (Rigaku), X-Ray microtomographer (Skyscan).

Additionally, for the computational/modelling part of the proposed work, commercial software, including MATLAB, will be used for image processing of the vascular images and visualization of the model predictions. Microsoft Visual Studio will be employed for the development of the model, and the commercial finite element program COMSOL, will be used for further computations. EPOS has access to multi-photon /confocal microscopes. State-of-the-art animal facilities are available to the team in contractual agreement with Cyprus Institute of Neurology and Genetics. For advanced In Vivo imaging EPOS is currently being equipped with a whole animal system which combines factory upgrade of OI/CT with FLT imaging capabilities and equipped with a low dose standard X-Ray CT_SD system (MiLabs).