Johan Neyts is Co-Founder of AstriVax Therapeutics and a Full Professor of Virology at KU Leuven, Belgium, where he heads the Laboratory of Virology, Antiviral Drug and Vaccine Research at the Rega Institute.

Neyts conducted post-doctoral research at the Rega Institute and the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center in the USA, before building a two-decade academic career at KU Leuven's Faculty of Medicine.

Alongside co-founder Kai Dallmeier, Neyts pioneered the PLLAV (Plasmid Launched Live Attenuated Virus) technology over more than a decade, enabling the rapid engineering of highly thermostable vaccines against multiple viral pathogens.

Neyts previously co-founded Okapi Sciences in 2009 as CSO, a KU Leuven spin-off focused on animal antivirals that was acquired by Aratana Therapeutics in 2014, and also co-founded the Belgian VirusBank Platform, a government-backed pandemic preparedness initiative.

AstriVax raised a record-breaking 30 million euro seed round, the largest in KU Leuven spin-off history, and advanced to clinical-stage within two years, with Neyts having published over 670 peer-reviewed papers and garnered more than 52,000 academic citations.