Sune Bergstrom, who has died aged 88 after a long illness, won the Nobel prize for medicine in 1982, sharing the award with the famous British pharmacologist Sir John Vane and Bengt Samuelsson, his fellow Swedish biochemist. They discovered the vital role played in the body by a family of substances called prostaglandins and related compounds.
They showed that prostaglandins were hormone-like agents involved in many processes that caused inflammation after an injury or illness, affected the flexibility of blood vessels, regulated contractions of the uterus, helped to clot blood, and directed other activities.
However, prostaglandins differed from hormones in that they acted locally, near their site of production, and they were metabolised very rapidly. Another unusual feature was that the same prostaglandins acted differently in different tissues.
These revelations opened the way for new approaches to treating heart disease, strokes, and gastric ulcers, for the development of a morning-after pill and of prostaglandin-inhibiting compounds that gave effective relief of pains caused by menstruation, gallstones or kidney stones.
The new findings provided important clarification about the mechanisms of existing treatments, especially through Vane's work on aspirin. Although aspirin had been the most frequently used painkiller worldwide for the best part of a century, scientists did not know how it worked until the biological activity of prostaglandins was unravelled.
Indeed, it was five years after American astronauts first flew to the moon in 1969 that the research by Vane, Bergstrom and Samuelsson was able to explain how the aspirin in the first-aid kits for Apollo astronauts eased the headaches and muscle pains that often occurred during the long missions to the moon, by blocking the action of prostaglandins.
Sune Bergstrom was born in Stockholm and studied medicine and chemistry at the Karolinska institute in the city. His scientific work started in 1934 when he assisted Erik Jorpes at the Karolinska in early research on heparin, the agent that delays blood clotting.
Although the Karolinska was then one of the leading laboratories in the world, also in the field of nucleic acids and of peptide hormones, Jorpes was concerned about the lack of research on lipids or steroids in Sweden. So he financed a trip for Bergstrom to visit Britain in 1938 to work on bile acids with the brilliant GAD Haslewood at Hammersmith postgraduate medical school, in London.
The following year, Bergstrom received a fellowship from the British Council to work in Edinburgh, which was cancelled when the war broke out. But he was then lucky enough to get a Swedish-American fellowship to work at Columbia University, New York, and at the Squibb Institute, New Brunswick, New Jersey, for two years with Oskar Wintersteiner on cholesterol autoxidation.
Bergstrom returned to Sweden and pursued the development of new techniques of introducing radioactive atoms into cholesterol to study its activity. His involvement with prostaglandins started at a meeting of the Physiological Society of the Karolinska Institute on October 19 1945, when the renowned Swedish pharmacologist Ulf von Euler proposed a new line of research for Bergstrom.
In fact, the origins of prostaglandin research were laid in the 1930s when von Euler and M Goldblatt, the British pharmacologist, independently found that seminal fluid and seminal vesicles from most animals, including man, contained a substance that caused contraction of the smooth muscle of the uterus. They called the new mystery factor prostaglandin.
At the Karolinska meeting 10 years later, von Euler asked Bergstrom if he was interested in studying the small amount of his lipid extracts of sheep vesicular glands that von Euler had stored since before the war.
Bergstrom and his associates made a crucial breakthrough when they purified two important prostaglandins, PGE and PGF, and identified their chemical structure. This marked the beginning of the discovery of a hitherto entirely unknown biological system that regulated several vital life processes and that came into play when the body's normal balance was disturbed.
By 1962 the six prostaglandins had been isolated and were shown to occur in many other tissues outside the male reproductive organs. Bergstrom's group found that the prostaglandins were formed by conversion of unsaturated fatty acids, primarily arachidonic acid, and through this discovery the metabolism of unsaturated fatty acids became of major interest in future research.
These fatty acids were found in most cells in the body and shown to be of fundamental importance for several processes in the healthy and diseased body. Once the structure of the prostaglandins was published, many projects started in university and pharmaceutical laboratories in Europe and North America on their synthesis. There are now thousands of synthetic analogues of prostaglandins and related products.
Bergstrom held professorships at the Karolinska from 1947 to 1980, and was its rector from 1969 to 1977. He was also chairman of the board of directors of the Nobel Foundation, Stockholm from 1975 onwards; chairman of the WHO global advisory committee on medical research, Geneva (1977-82); and president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1983). In 1943, he married Maj Gernandt; they had one son.
· Sune Karl Bergstrom, biochemist, born January 10 1916; died August 15 2004
