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 June 5. He was 90. old
Chiba Kazuhiro, the president of Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, where Dr. Endo is a professor emeritus, confirmed the death in a statement. The statement did not give a cause or say where he died.
Cholesterol, which is mostly made in the liver, has important functions in the body. It is also a major contributor to coronary artery disease, a leading cause of death in the United StatesJapan and many other countries.
In the early 1970s, Dr. Endo studied fungi in an effort to find a natural substance that could block an important enzyme that is part of cholesterol production. Some scientists worry that doing so could threaten the positive functions of cholesterol.
But in 1980, the team of Dr. Endo a cholesterol-lowering drug, or statin, lowers the level of LDL, or “bad” cholesterol, in the blood. And in 1987, after other researchers in the field published more research on statins, Merck produced the first licensed statin.
Such drugs have proven effective in reducing the risk for cardiovascular disease, and millions of people in the United States and beyond now take them for high LDL levels.
Akira Endo was born on Nov. 14, 1933, in Yurihonjo, a city in a mountainous area near the Sea of Japan. His parents were farmers, and he developed an interest in mushrooms and molds – one that would influence his work as a scientist.
He worked in the rice fields during the day and attended high school, against his parents’ wishes, at night. He was partly inspired by the desire to help farmers struggling with agricultural pests, said Kozo Sasada, a spokesman for Endo Akira Kenshokai, a group honoring Dr.’s legacy. Endo.
said Dr. Endo said his career was also inspired by a biography he read about Sir Alexander Fleming, a Scottish biologist who discovered penicillin in the 1920s.
“For me Fleming is a hero,” Dr. Endo said Igaku-Shoina Japanese medical publisher, in 2014. “I dreamed of becoming a doctor when I was a child, but I realized a new horizon because people who are not doctors can save people’s lives and contribute 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 wine at a factory in Tokyo.
He developed a better method of cultivating the mold by applying the method he used as a child to make miso and pickled vegetables, he later told M3, a website for medical professionals in Japan. . His reward was a promotion in the company’s microbiology and chemistry laboratory.
In the 1960s, he received a doctoral degree in biochemistry from Tohoku University. He also lived for several years in New York City, where he worked as a research associate 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 caused the death of his father and his grandparents.
“But when I went to the States, I found that there were many cases of heart disease, so I moved,” 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 an important enzyme involved in cholesterol production.
“I knew nothing but mold, so I decided to look for it in mold,” he said.
Eventually he found what he was looking for: a strain of penicillium, or blue mold, that, in chickens, lowered the level of an enzyme needed by cells to make LDL cholesterol.
Survivors include Dr. Endo his wife, Orie, his son Osamu, and his daughter, Chiga, according to Endo Akira Kenshokai. Complete information about the survivors was not immediately available.
After leaving Dr. Endo at 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 the Lasker Award, a prestigious honor from a New York foundation, for his medical research.
said Dr. Endo in a 2014 interview that he tried to build a career on solving a global problem that was not specific to Japan. He likens his work to scaling peaks higher than Mount Takao in Tokyo.
“If I’m going to climb a mountain,” he said, “Mount Everest is better.”
Orlando Mayorquin and Gina Kolata contributed reporting.
