Ghent has become one of Europe's densest health tech and biopharma clusters, and Tech Lane Ghent Science Park is its physical core. Spread across Campus Ardoyen and Campus Eiland , the park hosts some 60 R&D companies employing developed jointly by Ghent University, VIB (the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology) and public partners.
Its distinguishing feature is a complete infrastructure portfolio: two VIB Bio-Incubators - the original 8.000 m² facility at Ardoyen and a second, 6.000 m² building opened in 2024 alongside VIB's new headquarters at Eiland Zwijnaarde - followed by the Bio-Accelerator (18.000 m²) and Obelisc for scale-ups (7.500 m²). Adding to that a completely new pharma accelerator at Campus Eiland - the Nucleus - and Bioscape Tech Lane.
Ghent University anchors the science through its VIB-UGent centres for Medical Biotechnology, Inflammation Research and Plant Systems Biology, its Technology Transfer Office on the park itself, and - a few kilometres away at Ghent University Hospital - the Cancer Research Institute Ghent and the HIRUZ clinical trial and biobank platform.
Crucially, the region also has the regulated manufacturing capacity that translation ultimately requires. Ghent University Hospital operates CellGEN Therapies, its own GMP unit, established in 2014 and producing advanced therapy medicinal products for early-phase clinical trials since 2016: dendritic cell products, lipid nanoparticles and in-vitro transcribed RNA, multivirus-specific T cells and point-of-care CAR-T, with in-house lentiviral vector production now being added - a first for a Belgian hospital - and a newly expanded unit on the hospital campus. It works alongside GATE (Ghent Advanced Therapies and Tissue Engineering), a joint platform of Ghent University, UZ Gent, VIB and imec that brings together more than 35 research groups across six faculties, four core facilities and ten business developers dedicated to gene, cell and tissue therapy. At the commercial end of the same spectrum, Johnson & Johnson and Legend Biotech manufacture the CAR-T therapy Carvykti at two sites at Tech Lane Ghent Science Park.
The same ecosystem produced Ablynx (now Sanofi), argenx and Confo Therapeutics on the therapeutic side. In agri-biotech, the park houses Biotalys and Aphea.Bio. Adding to this the the Biovia cluster organisation at Flemish level, which makes Ghent an unusually short path from academic discovery to a company with lab space, capital and clinical access within the same aerial code.