Founded in 1924, the University of Trieste is a medium-sized university with 20,000 students. It offers a wide range of degree programmes at bachelor, master and doctoral level as well as short vocational masters, advanced masters and specialisation programmes. The university is involved in students and staff exchange programmes with universities in the EU and collaborates with several universities from Eastern Europe and other non-EU countries. It also participates in many research projects at national and international level.

The Department of Medical Sciences is the Department of the University of Trieste participating in the project. The mission of the Department is to educate medical students, graduate students, and post-doctoral fellows. It's main targets are identification of pathophysiological mechanisms and prevention as well as disease treatment.

The Department supports staff members involved in both basic science and healthcare delivery. Divisions include surgery, pathology, anaesthesiology, internal medicine, geriatric medicine, radiology, dermatology, nephrology, hepatology, endocrinology and metabolism, haematology, rheumatology, nutrition, urology, gynaecology, paediatrics, and occupational medicine.

The main focal areas are medical education, basic research, and clinical investigation. The Department is home to 90 full-time faculty members. It provides extensive MD and PhD programmes in the fields of academic and basic science. There are 29 schools of medical specialisation active in this department for the formation of specialists, including pathologists.

The Department of Medical Sciences includes the Molecular Histopathology Laboratory, run by Prof. Giorgio Stanta. This laboratory has been the first one to develop molecular analysis in fixed and paraffin embedded tissues and it has been the first one to extract and quantify RNA from this kind of tissues. It is a reference point in Molecular Pathology for many European organisations (IMPACTS (www.impactsnetwork.eu), ESP, OECI, BBMRI-ERIC, ESMO). The laboratory is involved in European Working Groups about pre-analytical conditions of tissues, standardisation in molecular methods, standardisation of tumour heterogeneity in diagnostics and clinical research, verification and validation of biomarkers.