History

The IBBL story began in 2000, when the EU called for a more innovative society in its Lisbon Strategy. Inspired by this new direction for Europe, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg decided to develop “The Luxembourg Health Sciences and Technologies Action Plan”, a commitment to invest in biosciences and make Luxembourg the bioscience hub for Europe. Through the creation of a center of excellence in biomedical research and development, Luxembourg sought long-term improvement of health services through advancements in care, recruitment of scientific and technology talent to Luxembourg, long-term partnerships within the EU and other nations, and sustainable economic growth for the country.

 

A fundamental tenet of the Action Plan was to build and expand core research competencies that would fuel research and discovery.  In June 2008, the government of Luxembourg announced the creation of a strategic partnership with three U.S. research centres to create a personalized medicine programme utilizing a systems biology approach to take advtange of the powerful new advances in technology that easily generate large data sets on individual patients. 

 

The strategic partnership involved the University of Luxembourg and various research centres working in partnership with the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) in Phoenix, Arizona, the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) in Seattle, Washington, and the Partnership for Personalized Medicine (PPM), a collaborative effort between Arizona State University in Phoenix (ASU) and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC) in Seattle.

 

This partnership called for the creation in Luxembourg of three major programmes devoted to molecular medicine, with an initial focus on molecular diagnosis for the purpose of transforming the healthcare systems for the people of Luxembourg and for promoting economic growth in biotechnology:

  1. Luxembourg Centre For Systems Biomedicine (LCSB)
  2. The Integrated Biobank of Luxembourg (IBBL)
  3. Lung Cancer Project (LCP)- a pilot programme in lung cancer to find and validate biomarkers to more effectively manage disease and therapeutic follow-up

 The IBBL was officially opened on 25th February 2010.