Patrice Cani received the 2026 Francqui-Collen Prize

Patrice Cani, a professor at UCLouvain and a researcher at both the Louvain Drug Research Institute and the WEL Research Institute, is a joint winner of the 2026 Francqui-Collen Prize, one of the country's highest scientific honours. Often described as the "Belgian Nobel Prize", this award recognises excellence in non-commercial fundamental research and comes with a sum of €250,000.

Patrice Cani is being honoured for his pioneering work on the gut microbiota and its role in metabolic diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. His research has profoundly transformed our understanding of the links between diet, the gut, the brain and human health. His work spans several major breakthroughs. He showed that a diet rich in saturated fats alters the gut microbiota and lets pro-inflammatory bacterial components pass into the bloodstream, driving the low-grade chronic inflammation behind insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes a finding that also revealed the role of the intestinal barrier. He went on to map the two-way dialogue between the gut and the brain, showing that this communication travels along both hormonal and nervous pathways and runs in both directions from gut to brain and from brain to gut. Alongside his work on Akkermansia muciniphila, which gave rise to a university spin-off bringing the bacterium to the global market, his team also discovered an entirely new bacterium, Dysosmobacter welbionis, whose beneficial effects on metabolism and inflammation are now opening fresh avenues of research.

Copyright Palais Fondation Francqui