UZ Leuven: Enhancing patient care with powerful genomics in a secure cloud

UZ Leuven, one of Belgium's largest hospitals (2,000+ beds, 10,000 staff), saw genomics lab demand grow fivefold in a few years while turnaround requirements tightened from 5 days to as little as 8 hours, all under strict GDPR and Belgian regulatory compliance. Working with Google Cloud Premier Partner Localyse, it migrated its genomics pipeline using Cloud Spanner, Compute Engine, Cloud Life Sciences, GKE and a BigQuery pilot. IT Director Reinoud Reynders said the goal was "a flexible solution that could adapt to any request," and the move reduced IT costs, improved SLA reliability, and positioned the 200-person IT department to pursue further capabilities like predictive analytics for patient care.

Google supplies AI to pharma through several distinct lines — Gemini/Vertex AI as an enterprise platform, and AlphaFold-based drug design licensed commercially through Isomorphic Labs.

This sits in the Build stage of the AI use-case lifecycle: Named examples from the foundation-model labs and platforms pharma teams use to actually construct, train and generate the model or application.