VirusBank Platform

The VirusBank Platform is a research platform at the KU Leuven, founded in 2022 with the financial support of the Belgian Federal government, leveraging Belgium’s world-class virology expertise and highly secured research infrastructure that enables automated manipulation and high-throughput handling of pathogenic viruses. The mission of the VirusBank Platform is to better prepare society for future viral epidemics and pandemics. The platform combines a strategic collection of viruses with a state-of-the-art toolbox including but not limited to cellular viral infection assays and animal infection models. It also consists of large libraries of drug-like small-molecules that are essential to help identifying druggable targets in the replication cycle of viral families with epidemic and pandemic potential s and to facilitate drug discovery and development efforts. The VirusBank Platform is open to various forms of collaboration, with the goal of expediting the discovery and development of prophylactic and therapeutic strategies against viral families posing potential epidemic/pandemic threats.