Dr Edward Lunt obituary
29 March 1929 鈥� 18 October 2024
Eddy Lunt was born in Chester, Cheshire. He attended Chester Grammar School where he excelled in science and the arts. He chose to study chemistry, his main passion, at Birmingham University where he obtained his BSc and also met his wife to be (Josephine Hunt).
They married in 1953 and moved south for Eddy to take up a job at May & Baker, Dagenham in the then renowned pharmaceutical research institute (which had a decade earlier invented M&B 693, one of the earliest and most famous sulphonamide drugs for bacterial infection).
The policy at that institution at the time was to broaden experience and Eddy was sent to the University of East Anglia to conduct post graduate research with Alan Katritzky, and complete his PhD. Katritzky became Eddy’s hero - woe betide anyone in Dagenham who criticised UEA or Alan Katritzky!
Eddy was a true heterocyclic chemist applying his science and knowledge to many projects to which he was assigned. He was one of the first to discover that rings could be replaced by cyclic hydrogen bonding networks, and applied this concept to the invention of M&B 22948
(Zaprinast, Nature volume 251, pages 650-652 (1974)) - a compound with remarkable abilities to inhibit the passive cutaneous anaphylactic (PCA) reaction. The exact mode of action of this molecule was then unknown but it was the most sought-after molecule from the M&B repository by academics.
Zaprinast did not make it to market as an asthma drug. It was not known when first isolated that Zaprinast had PDE-V inhibitory properties and was an early forerunner of sildenafil (Viagra). Eddy later worked on tetrazoles in this same hydrogen bonding network, inventing M&B 35268 (Eflumast) a revolutionary 5-carboxy tetrazole derivative, also developed for asthma, but which also did not meet its objectives in clinical development.
Subsequently, Eddy worked closely with Professor Malcolm Stevens and Bob Stone of Aston University on the cyclisation reactions of 5-diazo-imidazole-4-carboxamide with isocyanates to make imidazotetrazines, Perhaps, most famously, Eddy was a co-inventor named on the consequent patent which covered mitozolomide, and its successor temozolomide.
The latter did make it to market, albeit not with M&B - as Rhone-Poulenc, (the parent company of M&B) chose to stop the development of temozolomide in-house in 1987. Temozolomide was handed back to the Cancer Research Campaign (now CRUK) which had funded the Aston Group.
CRC took the project to the US company Schering-Plough, who developed it. Marketed as Temodal, it has been a pivotal drug for glioblastoma and has, to date, netted around $18 Bn in revenues for Merck (which had acquired Schering-Plough). Eddy retired in 1990 from M&B and was feted on a day attended by another of Eddy’s heterocyclic chemistry colleagues, Professor David Ollis.
Out of the laboratory, Eddy devoted much time to sport, mainly football, working with local youth teams and always supporting his local team, from Southend United and Norwich City to most recently Leicester City. He was also a keen bridge player and a talented poet (you can ), who can be heard declaiming (), and a supporter of the arts and music.
But, above all, he was a family man. He loved and was loved by his wife Josephine, who sadly pre-deceased him, his six children his sixteen grandchildren and his twenty two great grandchildren he will be greatly missed by them all.
Eddy once said to one of his M&B colleagues “there are no characters left in chemistry these days”. How wrong he was.
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