Why Wallonia?
Few places pack as much punch into so small a footprint as Wallonia. Nestled in the heart of Europe, within a few hours of London, Paris and Amsterdam, Wallonia may be most famous for forests and castles, but health innovation is where the region really shines.
Wallonia is becoming renowned for its leading position in Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products (ATMPs)—groundbreaking treatments like cell and gene therapies, representing a shift towards personalized, curative medicine. Specifically, the region is investing heavily in advanced bioproduction and late-stage industrialization—momentum captured by a soaring ATMP pipeline.
And when it comes to nuclear medicine, Wallonia is simply world-class: from isotope production and GMP radiopharmacies to equipment makers and theranostics leaders, the ecosystem is internationally recognized for its depth and breadth. Liège, in particular, has built a formidable clinical and industrial base—from one of Belgium’s earliest PET centers at CHU Liège to a cluster of radiopharma companies powering innovation and global supply.
There is plenty to discover in the southern reaches of Belgium, which is why BioWin organized its tour into two tracks: the ‘Advanced Therapies’ track sponsored by Deloitte which visited the BioPark; and the ‘Nuclear Medicine’ track sponsored by PwC, which headed to LégiaPark for a day of discovery.
As one participant put it: “What struck me is how simple it felt to connect, almost like a shortcut into the heart of Belgium’s health ecosystem.”
BioPark Charleroi
Participants in the Advanced Therapies track got on a bus to BioPark, arriving at a buzzing campus that covers the full biotech value chain, from R&D to biomanufacturing. The BioPark brings together 3,700 people from 106 companies working on ATMPs, bioproduction, immunology and nuclear medicine. It’s a mature hub, with deep academic ties to Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and UMONS, three research institutes on site (CMMI, IMI and IBMM), and access to the pathology and genetics institute IPG.
Charleroi’s BioPark has a decade-plus head start in ATMP manufacturing: pioneers like MaSTherCell launched GMP cell-therapy operations in Gosselies in 2011, seeding a deep local talent base and know-how which has since been reinforced by companies like Catalent and Thermo Fisher Scientific, the BioPark’s Cell & Gene Therapy Accelerator, and the EU Biotech Campus training hub—a multi-operator training hub for next-gen bioprocess, digital, and 4.0 skills—making the park a natural magnet for ATMP startups and scale-ups.
The BioPark has extraordinary scale and support for market-readiness: four incubators provide flexible offices and wet labs, with incubator number 5 set to open early 2026, bringing the total infrastructure to ~50,000 m², including a 200-seat conference center, and on-site airport logistics connecting Charleroi with the world.
Resident companies to keep an eye on at BioPark:
- convEyXO: Building exosome-based therapeutics for inflammatory and degenerative diseases and platform approaches to miRNA-enhanced EVs.
- Aboleris Pharma: Advancing novel strategies against autoimmune disease; the French-Belgian team chose Charleroi to plug into platforms and partners.
- Minoryx: A clinical-stage biotech developing treatments for orphan CNS disorders, with Belgian R&D operations based right on the BioPark campus.
LégiaPark (Liège)
People on the Nuclear Medicine track headed to LégiaPark, a purpose-built life-sciences campus right opposite CHC MontLégia. Spread across ~30,000 m² between two connected buildings, the park is kitted out for companies moving from R&D to regulated production, with BL2 labs, clean rooms, GMP-enabling modules, logistics zones, and plenty of collaborative space.
What really sets Liège apart as a world-class nuclear-medicine hub is the way clinic, university, and industry have grown together over several decades under a common coordinated structure, Bridge 2 Health (B2H). CHU de Liège was among the first Belgian hospitals to run a clinical PET center (in 1996) and today combines PET/CT, SPECT and expanding GMP radiopharmacy capacity—an anchor for trials and care. A few minutes away, ULiège’s GIGA Cyclotron brings 30+ years of radiochemistry and tracer-development expertise (including fluorine-18 production), giving startups and scale-ups direct access to rare infrastructure and know-how.
These platforms have, in turn, attracted and nurtured industry leaders—from equipment makers and QC specialists to logistics players like Trasis and Elysia. LégiaPark has created a hub where companies can tap straight into shared technology cores, academia, clinical partners, and local investors without leaving the neighborhood. It’s a high-trust, high-tempo setup designed to get radiopharma ideas to patients faster.
Resident companies in the B2H community:
- THERAtRAME: a ULiège/WELBIO spin-off pioneering small-molecule drugs against the tRNA epitranscriptome to tackle treatment-resistant cancers.
- THAMEUS (Baby Detect): the team behind genomic newborn screening in Liège, expanding the heel-prick to detect >160 treatable diseases via targeted NGS.
- Trasis: Liège’s radiopharma powerhouse supplying automated synthesizers, QC, and dispensing systems used worldwide for diagnostic and therapeutic radio-tracers.
- EXO Biologics: a biotech company developing exosome-based therapies and extracellular vesicle technologies, operating an integrated site for R&D and manufacturing.
Three regions with synergistic strengths
Wallonia’s ATMP and nuclear-medicine depth meshes perfectly with the complementary science base in Brussels and manufacturing and medtech power in Flanders—a compact, collaborative triangle where ideas, people, and products move fast from Belgium to the rest of the world. That cross-regional flow is a big reason Belgium consistently punches above its weight in biotech and biopharma on the global stage.
