Patrice D. Cani MSc, PhD

Patrice D. Cani is a full professor of Physiology, Metabolism, and Nutrition and leading a research team at the Louvain Drug Research Institute (LDRI) of the University of Louvain (UCLouvain, Brussels, Belgium). He is an honorary research director from the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (FRS-FNRS) and a WELRI (WELBIO) investigator. After a B.Sc. degree in dietetics, he joined the Faculty of Medicine of UCLouvain where he received a M.Sc. in Nutrition, another M.Sc. in Health Sciences, and a PhD in Biomedical Sciences (physiology, metabolism, and nutrition).

Patrice is a recipient of prestigious grants such as two ERC grants (Starting Grant ENIGMO 2013, PoC ERC grant Microbes4U 2016). He received the prize “Baillet Latour Grant for Medical Research” (2015), the “International Prize of Physiology Lucien Dautrebande” (2016), the “Award for Excellence in Biomedical Research and Creativity” from the joint scientific committee of the Academies of Medicine of Belgium and France, and the Council of the JA DeSève Research Chair of Québec (2019), Prize for Biomedical Research (The AstraZeneca Foundation & KAGB/ARMB) (2022).

Patrice has been elevated to the rank of Officer of the Walloon Merit (OMW) and elected as a member of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium in 2016. He also received the Bauchau Chair at UNamur (2016) and the Francqui Chair at ULiège (2017 ). In 2007, he published the discovery of the concept of metabolic endotoxemia, and more recently, he discovered the beneficial role of the bacteria Akkermansia muciniphila on obesity and cardiometabolic risk factors. His main research interests are the investigation of interactions between gut microbes and hosts in the context of obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiometabolic disorders, and cancer.