Health in the Leuven Innovation Region

One of the main focuses of the Leuven Innovation Region is the development and use of health tech.

Leuven has a rich history in medical and health science. From Andreas Vesalius, one of the most important founders of modern anatomy in the 16^th century, up to developments of first HIV curing treatments and the first cochlear hearing aids, to name a few.

KU Leuven, which continually draws talent and resources to Leuven, is one of the motors behind this focus. The university is joined in Leuven by other major knowledge institutions, including imec (Europe’s largest independent nanoelectronics research center) and UZ Leuven (Europe’s second-largest academic hospital)

Together, these institutions employ roughly 22.000 people and have an annual R&D budget of €1 billion. A striking example of KU Leuven’s capacity to attract resources is its Gemma Frisius Fund, a seed fund that, for every euro invested by the university, gains €80 in funding from industry.

Leuven - and Belgium as a whole - is also held in high regard when it comes to biomedical R&D, partly because of the highest number of clinical tests per capita worldwide. Researchers followed excellent education, equipment is state of the art and the procedure to start Phase 1 studies is one of Europe's fastest. Knowledge institutions KU Leuven, imec and VIB all have a strong focus on biomedical R&D. They collaborate with global players in the pharmaceutical and health care industries, and have set up numerous spin-off companies with global appeal.

The Rega Institute for Medical Research is a biomedical research center founded in 1954 in Leuven, and is one of the few facilities in the world capable of testing thousands of molecules at high speed. The institute is specialized in research on drugs against bacterial and viral infections.

The center pioneered a polio vaccine in the 1950s and achieved world fame with its HIV inhibitor tenofovir: today, 20 of the total of 35 million AIDS patients are treated with the drug. The Rega Institute is is conducting research into antiviral drugs against the coronavirus.

The VIB (Flemish Institute for Biotechnology) is a globally leading research institute. It is a European Centre of Excellence in life sciences where some 1,500 top international scientists conduct pioneering basic research. The main activity is basic research in life sciences to find practical applications for patients and society in general.

As such, VIB researchers in Leuven are pushing the boundaries about what we know about molecular mechanisms and how they rule living organisms such as human beings, animals, plants and micro-organisms. KU Leuven hosts three VIB research centers dispersed over various locations.

As a world-class biomedical, clinical and nanotechnology R&D hub, KU Leuven, UZ Leuven, VIB and imec are on a mission to decode dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases, with the aim of curing or preventing them.

By leveraging the biomedical, clinical and technological expertise of the Leuven-based founding partners, they accelerate medical discovery towards a future without neurodegeneration.

By taking a multi-angle approach to tackle neurodegenerative disease, they zoom in on the cellular and intracellular levels via nanoscale technologies, and study symptoms and disease processes in humans. Mission Lucidity brings those two levels together by looking at the modulation of brain activity and processes.