John Vane, who died on Friday aged 77,shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1982 for his discovery, in 1976, of prostacyclin, the blood-vessel dilating prostaglandin that inhibits blood-clotting, and for his earlier work on aspirin.

Vane’s discoveries led to new treatments for heart and blood-vessel disease, and to the development and introduction of a new class of life-saving drugs to control pulmonary hypertension – the Ace inhibitors – from which tens of thousands of people around the world have since benefitted.

John Robert Vane was born in Worcestershire, England, on March 29, 1927. When he was 12, his parents gave him a chemistry set for Christmas. The present ignited a passion for experimentation – and also an explosion in the Vanes’ newly decorated kitchen that prompted his father to build and equip a garden shed for John’s future experiments.

In college, Vane was disappointed to find that experimentation was not encouraged. Asked by the professor of chemistry Maurice Stacey what he wished to do after graduating, Vane replied: “Anything but chemistry.”

Stacey pointed his pupil in the direction of pharmacology, and although Vane was almost completely ignorant of the subject he seized the opportunity, presented to him by Stacey, to train under the Oxford pharmacologist Harold Burn. Vane went to work for Burn in Oxford in 1946.

Burn’s laboratory was then on the way to becoming the most important center for pharmacological research in Britain. Having been awarded a research Fellowship by the Royal Society, he completed his doctorate in 1953.

From Oxford, Vane went to Yale University as an instructor, then assistant professor, then back to Britain at the Royal College of Surgeons at London University.

He developed, with others, the cascade super fusion bioassay technique for measurement of, dynamically and instantaneously, the release and fate of vasoactive hormones in the circulation or in the perfusion fluid of isolated organs.

In the mid-1960s Vane turned his attention to prostaglandins, which have many functions to do with the circulation, inflammation, and control of muscular contractions.

In 1971,Vane discovered that aspirin blocks the action of thromboxane in the blood platelets. Only a small dose, 75mg a day, is necessary to prevent the blood from clotting, and so has considerable potential for preventing such disorders as heart attacks, strokes, and leg thromboses.

In 1973, Vane became research and development director for the Wellcome Foundation. He took with him a group of colleagues from the Royal College of Surgeons, and this in due course expanded into a prostaglandin research department under the leadership of Salvador Moncada. It was here that prostacyclin was discovered and its pharmacology developed.

Vane was knighted in 1984, and left the Wellcome Foundation the next year. In 1986 he became founder director of the William Harvey Research Institute, to further research atherosclerosis. Having built up a membership of more than 100, he stepped down to become honorary president in 1997.

Since 1986, Vane had been a professor of pharmacology and of medicine, New York Medical College. He also held a visiting professorship at Harvard.

He was elected a Member of the Royal Society in 1974, and served as a vice-president of the society from 1985 to 1987. He was the recipient of international medals, prizes, and honorary degrees too numerous to list.