Paul Janssen

Paul Adriaan Jan, Baron Janssen (born 12 September 1926 in Turnhout, Belgium – 11 November 2003 in Rome, Italy) was the founder of Janssen Pharmaceutica, a pharmaceutical company with over 20,000 employees.

Paul Janssen was the son of Constant Janssen and Margriet Fleerackers. On 16 April 1957, he married Dora Arts.

He attended secondary school at the Jesuit St-Jozef college in Turnhout, after which he decided to follow in his father's footsteps and become a physician. During World War II, Janssen studied physics, biology, and chemistry at the Facultés universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix (FUNDP) in Namur. He then studied medicine at the Catholic University of Leuven and the University of Ghent. In 1951, Janssen graduated "magna cum laude" in medicine from the University of Ghent.

During his military service, he worked at the University of Cologne in Germany at the Institute of Pharmacology of J. Schuller, where he worked until 1952. After he returned to Belgium he worked part-time at the Institute of Pharmacology and Therapeutics (University of Ghent) of Professor Corneille Heymans, who had won the Nobel prize for medicine in 1938. Janssen founded his own research laboratory in 1953, with a loan of 50,000 Belgian francs from his father. In 1953 he also discovered his first drug ambucetamide, an antispasmodic found to be particularly effective for the relief of menstrual pain.

In 1956, Janssen received his teaching certificate for higher education in pharmacology (Venia legendi) with a thesis on Compounds of the R 79 type. He then left the university and in 1956 established the company which would become Janssen Pharmaceutica. On 11 February 1958 he made haloperidol a major breakthrough in the treatment of schizophrenia. Paul Janssen and his team developed the fentanyl family of drugs, and many other anesthesia-related drugs, such as droperidol and etomidate which made a significant contribution to anesthesiology. One of the drugs he developed for the treatment of diarrhea, Diphenoxylate (Lomotil), even made it into space and was used during the Apollo program. In 1985, his company was the first Western pharmaceutical company to set up a pharmaceutical factory in the People's Republic of China (Xi'an). In 1995 he founded the Center for Molecular Design, together with Paul Lewi, where he and his team used a supercomputer to search for candidate molecules to find a treatment for AIDS.

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