statin discovery

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FYI

from American Scientist

In 1966, Akira Endo, a young Japanese biochemist, started an

adventure that would ultimately save thousands, if not millions, of

lives.

Only 33 years old at the time, Endo was a research scientist at Sankyo­a

pharmaceutical company, later known as Daiichi Sankyo, in Tokyo­where he

was looking for enzymes in fungal extracts for improving the quality of

certain foodstuffs. But his research was soon to enter a new realm.

As he would write years later: " In the mid-1960s, fascinated by

several excellent reviews on cholesterol biosynthesis by Konrad Bloch of

Harvard University, who received the Nobel Prize in 1964, I became

interested in the biochemistry of cholesterol and other lipids. "

Endo's curiosity triggered research that eventually spawned one of

today's most widely used families of drugs.