New UZ Gent cleanroom to boost clinical studies in Flanders

Starting from 2026, every hospital pharmacy in Flanders must comply with the strict PIC/S standard for pharmaceutical preparations. But UZ Gent isn’t waiting until that deadline. In taking the initiative, the university hospital’s pharmacy will start using brand-new and innovative cleanroom facilities in 2023. 

The to-be-built space at the hospital pharmacy will include several facilities. For starters, it will feature a cleanroom for the sterile and non-sterile preparation of drugs for use in healthcare and clinical trials. Pharmacy employees will use isolation techniques as much as possible to avoid coming into contact with the raw materials during the preparation of medicines. Other hospitals that do not want to invest in building an in-house cleanroom will be able to form partnerships to use the UZ Gent infrastructure. 

In addition, there will be a cleanroom for the production of non-sterile medicines for clinical studies requiring a Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) license. In fact, the UZ Gent Pharmacy is currently the only hospital pharmacy in Belgium to have such a license, producing medicines for clinical studies that take place inside and outside the hospital as well as for various other hospitals in Europe. 

The combination of these facilities on the UZ Gent campus, close to where the research happens, makes the hospital pharmacy a preferred partner for researchers and pharmaceutical organizations. The new cleanroom infrastructure will undoubtedly contribute to groundbreaking research into innovative therapies thanks to its broad offering of end-to-end, GMP and GDP services as well as hospital exemption services, small-batch medicine production and last-minute services. 

As such, the project will add another asset to Flanders’ life sciences & health ecosystem, which already has one of the fastest procedures for clinical trials in the world.