Lovastatin FDA approved 1987
Lovastatin, isolated by Merck from Aspergillus terreus and derived from Endo's original fungal finding, received FDA approval in 1987 as the first commercial statin.
Snapshot · The Peter Attia Drive
#401 ‒ How curiosity transforms medicine: extraordinary discoveries that changed modern healthcare
Explore episode
Jul 27, 2026
Where this was said
The discovery of statins: how fungi provided the blueprint for cholesterol-lowering drugs
At 18:10 · chapter starts 15:15
By the late 1960s, the biochemistry of cholesterol synthesis was well understood, and every medicinal chemist in the field knew that inhibiting HMG-CoA reductase — the rate-limiting enzyme — should lower cholesterol. But nobody knew how to design such an inhibitor from scratch. Akira Endo at Sankyo in Tokyo took a different approach: instead of asking how to design an inhibitor, he asked who in nature had already designed one. [1] — Peter Attia "6,000+ microbial strains screened for statins: Akira Endo and Masao Kuroda screened more than 6,000 microbial strains over two years before…" 17:20 His reasoning was elegant. Fungi have been in chemical competition with bacteria for hundreds of millions of years. Many bacteria need sterols to build their cell membranes, so a fungus that could block bacterial sterol synthesis would have a lethal weapon. Penicillin was one such fungal weapon. An HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor could be another. Endo and his colleague Masao Kuroda screened over 6,000 microbial strains over two years before a strain of Penicillium citrinum from a Kyoto grain shop produced the hit they were looking for, in March 1972. Merck, working independently on a related compound from Aspergillus terreus, obtained FDA approval for lovastatin in 1987. [2] — Peter Attia "Lovastatin FDA approved 1987: Lovastatin, isolated by Merck from Aspergillus terreus and derived from Endo's original fungal finding, recei…" 18:10 From there came simvastatin, atorvastatin, rosuvastatin — the entire statin class that, by any reasonable estimate, has prevented millions of cardiovascular events and premature deaths. Peter notes that this is the cleanest example of a directed search for a natural solution: Endo had a hypothesis about where nature had already solved the problem, and he turned out to be right.
6,000+ microbial strains screened for statins
Akira Endo and Masao Kuroda screened more than 6,000 microbial strains over two years before finding the first fungal inhibitor of HMG-CoA reductase that led to statins.
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