KU Leuven and UZ Leuven Invest €14 Million in State-of-the-Art Cell and Gene Therapy Facility
UZ Leuven and KU Leuven are setting up an innovative facility for the production of Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products (ATMP) on the Gasthuisberg campus. With this, they want to develop groundbreaking therapies themselves from the end of 2025 and produce tailor-made treatments for individual patients. Many diseases are caused by genetic abnormalities or by the absence of a specific functional gene. Gene therapy can restore a patient’s hereditary material or silence a disease gene. With cell therapies, the patient’s own immune cells are genetically modified and replaced. With its own ATMP facility, UZ Leuven will be able to modify a patient’s immune cells itself, which will benefit doctors and patients.
Cell and gene therapy is already successfully applied today to certain cancers, neurodegenerative diseases, metabolic diseases and rare genetic diseases. A dedicated cell and gene facility offers new perspectives for patients with rare genetic diseases and difficult-to-treat cancers.
Accelerate ATMP development
Cell and gene therapy medication falls under the heading of Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products (ATMPs). Their production requires a specialized infrastructure with strict regulations and specially trained personnel. The development path of an ATMP is complex, which is why pharmaceutical companies are often not interested in financing experimental drugs in the initial phase. Cell and gene therapy treatments are especially important for patients for whom conventional treatments do not work. They can offer a solution for diseases for which no treatments exist or for which existing treatments fail. In certain cases, gene or cell therapy can even completely cure a disease. With our own production facility in Leuven, immunotherapy will become much simpler logistically for both doctor and patient.
Hub for clinical research
UZ Leuven will develop the new facility on the Gasthuisberg campus, together with KU Leuven and KU Leuven Research & Development. The new expertise center should be ready in the second half of 2025 and the production facility will meet the strict quality standards of the Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP). Successful tandems between committed doctors from UZ Leuven and specialized basic researchers from KU Leuven can lead to innovative therapies for an international patient population.
Bart Geers, investment manager at KU Leuven Research & Development: “By investing in our own ATMP facility, we are setting up a unique hub. We can support researchers, clinicians, professors and scientists in translating their project ideas into clinical applications. With a new infrastructure, we will produce advanced or experimental cell therapies according to industrial standards in the hospital. New therapy options will be available to patients more quickly.”