Jean-Pierre Lecocq
Jean-Pierre Willy Ghislain Lecocq (17 July 1947 – 20 January 1992) was a Belgian molecular biologist and biotech entrepreneur. Born in Gosselies and raised in Nivelles, he won a scholarship in 1965 to study chemistry at the Free University of Brussels, graduating with high honors in 1969. He began his PhD in René Thomas’s laboratory, studying how E. coli interacts with bacteriophage lambda, and identified bacterial genes that influence the decision between lysogeny and lysis, as well as RNA polymerase mutants. He finished his PhD in 1975 with summa cum laude. After a postdoc period and short research stays in the United States and Canada, he moved into industry.
From 1977 to 1980 Lecocq worked at SmithKline RIT in Belgium, where he built a molecular biology lab and led vaccine research against enteropathogenic E. coli and hepatitis B. In 1980 he became Scientific Director of Transgène, one of the first biotechnology companies in France, based in Strasbourg. He rose to vice president in 1984 and to president in 1990. When Transgène was acquired in 1991 by the Mérieux group, he became Corporate Director of Research and Development for the Pasteur-Merieux-Connaught Group in Lyon.
Lecocq died in a plane crash in 1992 at Mont Sainte-Odile, Alsace, leaving a wife, Mireille, and two children. He helped build collaborations between industry and academia and led the development of systems to produce recombinant proteins in bacteria, yeast, baculovirus and mammalian cells, along with recombinant virus technology. His team worked on vaccines and therapeutic proteins and produced monoclonal antibodies for diagnostics. He published around 130 papers.
To honor his work, the Fondation Jean-Pierre Lecocq was created in 1992, and since 1994 it awards a biannual prize for notable achievements in molecular biology and its applications.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 22:34 (CET).