Akira Endo, a Japanese biochemist whose work on fungi helped lay the foundation for a widely prescribed drug that lowers a type of cholesterol that contributes to heart disease, died on June 5. He was 90.
Kazuhiro Chiba, president of Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, where Endo served as professor emeritus, confirmed Endo's death in a statement, without disclosing the cause or place of death.
Cholesterol is produced primarily in the liver and plays a vital role in the body, including being a major contributor to coronary artery disease, the leading cause of death in the United States, Japan, and many other countries.
In the early 1970s, Dr Endo cultivated fungi to find natural substances that could inhibit an enzyme key to cholesterol production, even though some scientists feared that doing so would jeopardize cholesterol's beneficial functions.
But by 1980, Dr. Endo's team had discovered that cholesterol-lowering drugs, or statins, lowered levels of LDL, or “bad,” cholesterol in the blood, and by 1987, after other researchers in the field had published additional studies on statins, Merck was manufacturing the first approved statin.
These drugs have proven effective in reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease, and millions of people in the United States and abroad currently take them to treat high LDL cholesterol.
Akira Endo was born on November 14, 1933 in Yurihonjo, a city in the mountains near the Sea of ​​Japan. His parents were farmers, and he developed an interest in mushrooms and molds that influenced his work as a scientist.
He worked in the rice fields during the day and attended high school at night, despite his parents' objections. Endo took the job out of a desire to help farmers suffering from agricultural pests, says Kozo Sasada, a spokesman for the Endo Akira Kenshokai, a group that celebrates Endo's work.
Dr Endo also said that reading a biography of Sir Alexander Fleming, the Scottish biologist who discovered penicillin in the 1920s, influenced his career.
“Fleming was a hero to me,” Dr Endo told Igaku-Shoin, a Japanese medical publisher, in 2014. “As a child, I dreamed of becoming a doctor, but I realized a new horizon: you can save people's lives and contribute to society without being a doctor.”
After studying agriculture at Tohoku University, he joined the Japanese pharmaceutical company Sankyo in the late 1950s, and his first job was producing enzymes for fruit juice and wine at a factory in Tokyo.
He later told M3, a website for Japanese medical professionals, that he had developed a more efficient way to cultivate mold, adapting a technique he had used as a child to make miso paste and pickles. As a reward, he was promoted to the company's microbiology and chemistry lab.
He received his PhD in biochemistry from Tohoku University in the 1960s and lived in New York for several years, working as a research associate at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
At the time, he wanted to invent a cure for stroke, the leading cause of death in Japan, he later told M3: His father and grandparents had died from strokes.
“But when I went to the US, I realised there were a lot of patients with heart disease, so I made the switch,” he said.
Returning to Sankyo, in the early 1970s he cultivated more than 6,000 species of fungi as part of an effort to find natural substances that could inhibit a key enzyme involved in cholesterol production.
“I decided to look for it in the mold because that's all I knew,” he said.
He finally found what he was looking for: a type of penicillium, or blue mold, that reduces levels of an enzyme needed by chicken cells to make LDL cholesterol.
According to Akira Endo, Dr. Endo is survived by his wife, Orie, his son, Osamu, and his daughter, Senga. Complete information about the survivors was not immediately available.
After leaving Sankyo in the late 1970s, Dr. Endo served as professor at several Japanese universities and president of Biopharm Research Institute, a Japanese pharmaceutical company. In 2008, he received the prestigious Lasker Award from a New York foundation for medical research.
In a 2014 interview, Dr Endo said he had tried to build a career around solving global problems, not just those in Japan, and likened his job to climbing a mountain much higher than Tokyo's Mount Takao.
“If I'm going to climb a mountain, I might as well climb Everest,” he said.
Orlando Mallorquin Gina Kolata contributed reporting.