My friend Barry Kay, who has died aged 81, was emeritus professor of allergy and immunology at Imperial College London and a consultant physician at the nearby Brompton hospital. He pioneered work that revealed the underlying mechanisms of asthma and allergy, also running the Brompton allergy clinic and co-founding Circassia, an Imperial College biopharmaceutical company that develops vaccines to combat allergies.
Barry was co-editor of the journal Clinical & Experimental Allergy, co-authored 500 research papers and review articles, and was lead editor of the second edition of the textbook Allergy and Allergic Diseases (2008). Energetic and progressive, he supervised some 40 PhD students, many of whom are now professors around the world. He was a specialist adviser to the House of Lords select committee on allergy and president of the British and European societies for allergy and clinical immunology.
Born in Northampton, Barry was the son of Eva (nee Pearcey), a dress designer, and Tony Chambers, an area manager of a washing machine company. When Eva later married Harry Kay, Barry took on his stepfather’s surname.
As a boarder at the King’s school, Peterborough, Barry gained a place at Edinburgh medical school, where, in his final year, he helped to treat a young patient with severe asthma. He was assured that steroids would save her life, but they did not, and her death inspired his later research career.
After qualifying as a doctor in 1963, he did a PhD under the immunologist Robin Coombs at Cambridge University, followed by a year of postdoctoral research at Harvard University in 1970-71. Returning to Edinburgh University, he was appointed lecturer in respiratory medicine and then became deputy director of the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service. In 1980 he was appointed as a professor at Imperial College, simultaneously taking on his consultant role at the Brompton, where he spent the rest of his career.
Mild-mannered and playfully funny, Barry kept his own lungs in good shape with tennis and country walks, and by tending a fine vegetable patch. He played the bassoon to a high standard and filled his home with baroque music.
Barry met his wife, Rosemary (nee Johnstone), a writer, in his final student year when she sang in the choir he was conducting, and they married in 1963. She survives him, as do their three daughters, Emma, Rebecca and Beth, and six grandchildren, Sarah, Hugh, Percy, Skye, Spencer and Ben.
