Akira Endo

Akira Endo (1933–2024) was a Japanese biochemist whose work gave rise to the statins. In 1976, with Masao Kuroda and Yoshio Tsujita, he described in The Journal of Antibiotics three inhibitors of cholesterol synthesis produced by the mould Penicillium citrinum, and in the same year, with Kuroda, showed in FEBS Letters that they act by competitively inhibiting HMG-CoA reductase.

How he got there is more interesting than the result itself. Endo had earlier experience in biochemistry and in working with fungi, and from that combination he derived a working hypothesis: if fungi compete with microorganisms that need sterols, they ought to produce compounds that block sterols being made. Screening thousands of strains was a consequence of that hypothesis, not a blind search.

In 1979 Endo described monacolin K from a fungus of the genus Monascus, used in East Asia to ferment red rice. The compound turned out to be identical to lovastatin. The same molecule therefore existed simultaneously as an ingredient of a traditional foodstuff and as a drug candidate — which still complicates the regulation of red yeast rice supplements today.

The authors of a 2024 profile in Cureus call him the "father of statins" and argue that his career is worth reading as a model of how to do research. He himself gained no financial return proportionate to the scale on which statins are used, and never received a Nobel Prize, though he is regularly named among the most frequently cited candidates who did not.

His story also says something about how science turns into a product. Compactin, ML-236B, never became a drug — its development was halted, and the market went to molecules developed later by other teams. Discovering a mechanism and launching a medicine are two different processes, of different length and with different protagonists, and only the second tends to be reported.

For MykoŚwiat this profile carries one more point. It shows what fungal secondary metabolites are studied for — compounds a fungus does not need in order to grow, and which it makes in its dealings with other organisms. Penicillin, ciclosporin and the statins all came off that same shelf, where an enormous number of unexamined molecules still sit.

6,000 cultures and one crucial molecular distinction

The Lasker Foundation gives the scale of Endo’s programme: his team grew more than 6,000 fungi, harvested broth from every culture and tested in vitro whether it blocked an early step in cholesterol synthesis. They isolated compactin, also called mevastatin, from Penicillium citrinum. It should not be conflated with lovastatin. The American Chemical Society describes a separate path: Merck researchers isolated mevinolin, later named lovastatin, from Aspergillus terreus; that compound became the first FDA-approved statin in 1987.

Endo died on 5 June 2024. Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology confirms his career from Sankyo to a professorship at the university. The profile should therefore give his life years as 1933–2024 and keep three stages distinct: discovery of the inhibitor class, compactin itself, and the later commercial development of lovastatin.