Priscilla Piper
Born 7 January 1939, Ipswich and died 3 January 1995, Midhurst.
After graduating in 1962 with a BSc in Physiology, Piper joined Parke-Davis to work in the laboratory of the Research Director, HOJ Collier. When she decided to study for a PhD, Collier arranged for her to be supervised by his friend and colleague, John Vane.
Her PhD topic, the nature of the bioactive substances released from lung during anaphylaxis, was to prove to be her lifetime project. Her paper in Nature on this topic with Vane in 1969 was the first demonstration of the short-lived, highly active "rabbit-aorta contracting substance" or RCS (later identified as a mixture of thromboxane A2 and PGH2). An equally critical observation was the inhibition by aspirin of the formation of RCS during anaphylaxis.
Although Vane followed up these two findings to uncover the mechanism of action of aspirin and other NSAIDs (and eventually a share in a Nobel Prize), Piper chose to pursue another, equally active and ill-defined component of anaphylaxis, slow reacting substance (SRS-A).
A collaboration between Howard Morris at Imperial College and Piper’s team at the Royal College of Surgeons identified a new family of arachidonic acid metabolites, the leukotrienes, as the major biological activity in SRS-A.
The importance of leukotrienes in asthma was established through her collaboration with John Costello at King’s College Hospital and now the leukotriene receptor antagonists are widely accepted components of anti-asthma treatment.
Although she spent all her academic life at the Department of Pharmacology at the Royal College of Surgeons, ending as the third and last holder of the Vandervell Chair, she valued greatly her Honorary Membership of the Royal College of Physicians, as a sign of her contribution to clinical medicine.
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Priscilla Piper[edit]
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