Akira Endo, a Japanese biochemist whose research on fungi laid the foundation for a widely used drug that lowers a type of cholesterol that contributes to heart disease, died June 5 at age 90.
Kazuhiro Chiba is the president of Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, and Dr. Endo was an honorary professor at the university. The death was confirmed in a statementThe statement did not specify the cause of death or the location of his death.
Cholesterol is produced primarily in the liver and plays an important role in the body. It is also a major contributor to coronary artery disease, which is the cause of Causes of Death in the United StatesJapan and many other countries.
In the early 1970s, Dr. Endo was breeding fungi in an attempt to find a natural substance that could block a key enzyme in the cholesterol-making process, something some scientists worried might threaten cholesterol’s positive functions.
But by 1980, Dr. Endo’s team discovered that a cholesterol-lowering drug, a statin, could reduce levels of LDL, or “bad,” cholesterol in the blood. By 1987, after other researchers in the field published more findings about statins, Merck began producing the first licensed statin.
Such drugs have been shown to be effective in reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease, and millions of people in the United States and elsewhere are currently taking these drugs to treat high levels of LDL.
Akira Endo was born in Yurihonjo, a city in the mountains near the Sea of Japan, on November 14, 1933. His parents were farmers, and he developed an interest in mushrooms and molds, which also influenced him to become a scientist.
He worked in the rice fields during the day and went to high school at night despite his parents’ objections. He did this partly because he wanted to help farmers fight agricultural pests, said Kozo Sada, a spokesman for the Endo Akira Institute, an organization that honors Dr. Endo’s legacy.
Dr. Endo said his career was also inspired by a biography he read about Sir Alexander Fleming, the Scottish biologist who discovered penicillin in the 1920s.
“To me, Fleming is a hero.” Tell the Medical CollegeIn 2014, a Japanese medical publisher said: “I dreamed of becoming a doctor since I was a child, but I realized that people other than doctors can also save people’s lives and contribute to society.”
After studying agriculture at Tohoku University, he joined Japanese pharmaceutical company Sankyo in the late 1950s. His first job was at a factory in Tokyo producing enzymes for juice and wine.
He later told M3, a Japanese website for medical professionals, that he used the techniques he learned as a child making miso and pickles to develop a more efficient way to culture molds. His reward was a promotion to the company’s microbiology and chemistry labs.
In the 1960s, he earned a PhD in biochemistry from Northeastern University and lived in New York City for several years as a researcher at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
At the time, he later told M3, he wanted to invent a treatment for stroke, the leading cause of death in Japan. His father and grandparents had both died from strokes.
“But when I went to the United States, I learned that there were many cases of heart disease there, so I changed doctors,” he said.
After returning to Sankyo, he cultivated more than 6,000 fungi in the early 1970s as part of an effort to find natural substances that could block a key enzyme in the cholesterol-making process.
“All I knew about was mold, so I decided to look for it in mold,” he said.
He eventually found what he was looking for: Penicilliumalso known as blue mold, in chickens, can reduce the amount of an enzyme that cells need to make low-density lipoprotein cholesterol.
According to the Endo Akira Shokai, Dr. Endo’s survivors include his wife Orie, son Osamu and daughter Chiga. Complete information about the survivors is not yet available.
After leaving Sankyo Pharmaceutical in the late 1970s, Dr. Endo worked as a professor at several Japanese universities and as president of the Japanese pharmaceutical company Biopharm Research Laboratories. Lasker AwardThis is a special honor bestowed by a New York foundation in recognition of his medical research.
In a 2014 interview, Dr. Endo said he had tried to build his career around solving a global problem that was not unique to Japan. He likened his work to climbing a mountain much taller than Tokyo’s Mount Takao.
“If I were going to climb a mountain,” he said, “Everest would be better.”
Orlando Mayorquin Contributed reporting.
