Henry Lewis Halliday (29 November 1945 – 12 November 2022) was a British-Irish peaditrician and neonatologist. In 2021, Halliday was awarded the James Spence Medal for research into neonatology, for coordinating two of the largest neonatal multicentre trials for prevention and treatment of a number of neonatal respiratory illnesses and for a breakthrough in the development of a new lung surfactant that brought relief to very small babies suffering from infant respiratory distress syndrome (RDS).
Life
Halliday was one of four siblings, the eldest of four brothers. His father Louis Halliday was an accountant, while his mother Gladys was a shopkeeper. Halliday attended school at the Belfast Royal Academy before deciding to study medicine. He matriculated in 1965 at Queen's University Belfast medical school and graduated in 1970.
In 1977, Halliday married Marjorie Dalziel who was an intensive care nurse. The couple had three children, Joy, Gail & Brian Joshua, all of whom became doctors.
Career
Halliday decided to pursue a career in paediatrics with a specialism in neonatal medicine. After his postgraduate training in Belfast, he moved to the United States where he spent three years, first working at the Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital in Cleveland and later at the Cardiovascular Research Institute, University of California in San Francisco. In San Fransciso, Halliday met the influential John Allen Clements, a specialist in pulmonary surfactant who stimulated his interest in surfactant research and pulmonology.
Upon returning to Belfast in 1979 he was appointed to the Royal Maternity Hospital as second consultant neonatologist. At the Royal Maternity, Halliday worked to develop a new neonatal unit and to expand neonatal care across the whole of Northern Ireland. While there, he worked with the paediatrician's Garth McClure and Mark Reid along with the obstetrician, Knox Ritchie. In 1980, he passed the MD Thesis at Queens University with a paper on the role of left to right shunting through a patent ductus arteriosus.
Surfactant development
In 1984, Halliday held an randomised, controlled trial of an artificial surfactant known as the "Belfast surfactant" to test how effective it was on pre-term infants, for the treatment of RDS. The trial was largely a disappointment as he realised his artificial surfactant wasn't a good substitute for the natural surfactant.
Halliday's product was a synthetic lung surfactant called Turfsurf and was a mixture of Dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine and high-density lipoproteins in a ratio of 10:1. However, the surfactant was never developed into a commercial product as the trial was disappointing. In the same year, Halliday met Colin J Morley who had developed a synthetic lung surfactant known as "ALEC" with Alec Bangham. Morley analysed Halliday's results in a sub-group of infants of 25–29 weeks’ gestation in four trials and showed how that surfactant treated infants had lower death rates than if treated normally. As the control group was insufficiently large, Morley suggested to Halliday that he make contact with the Swedish physician Bengt Robertson who had also developed a surfactant Poractant alfa known under the trade name Curosurf. Robertson and his colleague Tore Curstedt had created Curosurf from pig lungs instead of cow lungs. Halliday spent a month with Robertson at the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm in November 1984, when they ran a 27 day pre-clinical trial both In vitro and in rabbit fetus's ventilated with a plethysmograph where Turfsurf was compared to Curosurf. Curosurf was found to be superior. Halliday witnessed the highly efficacious Corusurf at work when pre-term twins were treated, who were going blue in the face due to a lack of oxygen and almost immediately after treatment, turning a healthy pink.