This Podcast Will Kill You
This Podcast Will Kill You

Ep 218 The Lowdown on Statins

August 4, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In the early 1970s, a Japanese biochemist named Akira Endo was working at the pharmaceutical company Sankyo when he had an unusual idea. He was fascinated by Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of penicillin, and he knew that fungi produce antibacterial compounds to compete with other microbes in their environment. Endo reasoned that if fungi make compounds to kill bacteria, they might also produce compounds that interfere with other essential biological processes—like cholesterol production. Cholesterol is vital for life, so disrupting it would be a powerful competitive strategy. Endo and his team spent two years screening 6,000 strains of microbes. The second hit came from the mold Penicillium citrinum, and they named the compound compactin, later known as mevastatin. It was the first statin.

The Long Road to a Blockbuster Drug

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What you'll learn

  • 1 Ep 218: The Lowdown on Statins
  • 2 (04:11) **Akira Endo’s Discovery Story** - Excerpt from Endo’s own writing about how he came to search for cholesterol-lowering compounds in fungi
  • 3 (08:21) **The Pre-Statin Landscape** - By the 1970s, cardiology researchers accepted the cholesterol-heart disease link, but many physicians remained skeptical
  • 4 (12:43) **The Coronary Primary Prevention Trial** - The NIH’s large-scale study designed to prove that lowering cholesterol reduces cardiac events
  • 5 (15:11) **1984 NIH Consensus Conference** - The panel that turned cholesterol from an academic concern into a public health priority
  • 6 (16:55) **Endo’s Logic: Why Fungi?** - The reasoning behind searching for cholesterol inhibitors in mold
  • 7 (19:27) **The First Statins Enter Testing** - Early animal and human trials showed dramatic LDL reductions with few side effects

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Guests on this episode

Akira Endo

Show Notes

Last week, we set the stage by breaking down the science behind cholesterol: how it moves through our body, why it causes disease, and when we discovered the link between LDL and atherosclerosis. This week, armed with that knowledge, we’re asking the big question: what do we do about high cholesterol? Statins emerged as a highly effective intervention but one that is not without its share of controversy and misinformation. We delve into the story and science of statins and other cholesterol-lowering drugs, from their brilliant discovery to early promising trials, from barriers preventing their use to the heaps of misinformation abounding on the internet. How do statins actually work? What does penicillin have to do with their discovery? What’s the deal with side effects? Tune in for all this and more.

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