Pierre De Meyts studied medicine at the University of Liège in Belgium, where he graduated in 1969. After three years of specialization in Internal Medicine, he joined in 1973 the group of Jesse Roth at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, USA, where he started work on the insulin receptor. In 1975, he won the Solomon A. Berson Research and Development Award from the American Diabetes Association.

In 1976, he joined the International Institute of Cellular and Molecular Pathology in Brussels recently founded by Nobel Laureate Christian de Duve. De Meyts won the Belgian Alumni Prize in 1978 and shared the Diaz Cristobal Prize with his former mentor Jesse Roth at the IDF Congress in Vienna in 1979. In 1981, De Meyts won the Oskar Minkowski Prize from the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.

In 1986, he became Director of the Department of Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism and Associate Director of the Department of Molecular Genetics at the City of Hope National Medical Center and Beckman Research Institute in Duarte, California. He was also appointed Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of Southern California.

In 1995, he obtained the degree of "Agrégé de l’Enseignement Supérieur" (Ph.D) at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, where he is now Professor Emeritus in the Department of Chemistry. In 1995, he won the Quinquennial Prize Joseph Maisin of the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research for the Biomedical Sciences.

In 1990, De Meyts moved to Denmark to become Director of Research of the Hagedorn Research Institute in Gentofte, a position he held until May 2000. He then was Scientific Director of the Receptor Systems Biology Laboratory at the Hagedorn Research Institute until the end of 2010, when he retired from this position. He is currently an external consultant to the Hagedorn Research Institute. As of January 1st, 2011, De Meyts is Director of a private consulting company, De Meyts R&D Consulting SPRLU, based in Belgium.

From 2000 to 2005, he was also Adjunct Professor of Experimental Endocrinology in the Institute of Molecular Pathology, Faculty of Health Sciences at Copenhagen University.  In 2005, he received the Frontiers in Science Award from the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists.

He is member of numerous scientific societies and has served on the editorial board of several scientific journals including Endocrinology and the Journal of Biological Chemistry. He is currently Chief Editor of the online journal “Frontiers in Molecular and Structural Endocrinology” and Associate Editor of “Frontiers in Systems Physiology”

De Meyts is also known as a political and scientific cartoonist under the pseudonym Chuck.