Akira Endo, a Japanese biochemist whose research on fungi helped lay the groundwork for widely prescribed drugs that lower a type of cholesterol that contributes to heart disease, died on June 5. He was 90 years old.
Chiba Kazuhiro, president of Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, where Dr. Edo was an emeritus professor, confirmed the death in a statement. The statement did not give a cause or where he died.
Cholesterol, produced mainly in the liver, has important functions in the body. It is also a major contributor to coronary heart disease, a leading cause of death in the United States, Japan and many other countries.
In the early 1970s, Dr. Endo grew fungi in an attempt to find a natural substance that could block a critical enzyme that is part of cholesterol production. Some scientists were concerned that doing so could threaten the positive functions of cholesterol.
But by 1980, Dr. Endo’s team had discovered that a cholesterol-lowering drug, or statin, lowered the level of LDL, or “bad” cholesterol, in the blood. And by 1987, after other researchers in the field had published additional research on statins, Merck was making the first licensed statin.
Such drugs have been shown to be effective in reducing the risk of heart disease, and millions of people in the United States and beyond are now taking them for high LDL levels.
Akira Endo was born on November 14, 1933 in Yurihonjo, a town in a mountainous region near the Sea of ​​Japan. His parents were farmers and he developed an interest in mushrooms and molds – something that would influence his work as a scientist.
He worked in rice fields during the day and attended high school at night, against his parents’ wishes. It was inspired in part by a desire to help farmers struggling with agricultural pests, said Kozo Sasada, a spokesman for Endo Akira Kenshokai, a group honoring Dr.’s legacy. Endo.
Dr Eddo said his career was also inspired by a biography he read about Sir Alexander Fleming, a Scottish biologist who discovered penicillin in the 1920s.
“To me Fleming was a hero,” said Dr. Edo to Igaku-Shoin, a Japanese medical publisher, in 2014. “I dreamed of becoming a doctor since I was a child, but I realized a new horizon as people who are not doctors can save people. lives and contributes to society”.
After studying agriculture at Tohoku University, he joined Sankyo, a Japanese pharmaceutical company, in the late 1950s. His first assignment was making enzymes for fruit juices and wines at a factory in Tokyo.
He developed a more efficient way to grow mold by applying a method he had used as a child to make miso and pickled vegetables, he later told M3, a website for Japanese health professionals. His reward was a promotion to the company’s microbiology and chemistry lab.
In the 1960s, he received a doctorate in biochemistry from Tohoku University. He also lived for a few years in New York, where he worked as a research fellow at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
At the time, he later told M3, he wanted to invent a cure for stroke, the leading cause of death in Japan. Strokes had caused the death of his father and his grandparents.
“But when I went to the United States, I learned that there were many cases of heart disease, so I changed,” he said.
Back at Sankyo, he grew more than 6,000 fungi in the early 1970s as part of an effort to find a natural substance that could block a critical enzyme involved in cholesterol production.
“I didn’t know anything but mold, so I decided to look it up in the mold,” he said.
He finally found what he was looking for: a strain of penicillium, or blue mold, that, in chickens, reduced the levels of an enzyme that cells need to make LDL cholesterol.
Dr. Edo’s survivors include his wife, Ori, his son, Osamu, and his daughter, Chiga, according to the Edo Akira Kensokai. Complete information on the survivors was not immediately available.
After Dr. Edo left Sankyo in the late 1970s, he worked as a professor at several Japanese universities and served as president of Biopharm Research Laboratories, a Japanese pharmaceutical company. In 2008, he received a Lasker Award, a prestigious award from a foundation in New York, for his medical research.
Dr. Edo said in the 2014 interview that he had tried to build a career around solving a global problem that did not particularly concern Japan. He likened his work to raising peaks much higher than Mount Takao in Tokyo.
“If I were to climb a mountain,” he said, “Everest would be better.”
Orlando MayorquÃn and Gina Kolata contributed reporting.
