Statins: Drug Stories-Part I
STATINS Cholesterol was first isolated in 1784 from gallstones by French physician-chemist François Poulletier. French chemist Michel E. Chevreul named it cholesterine (solid bile in Greek: chole for bile and stereos for solid). The correct molecular formula for cholesterol was established in 1888 Austrian botanist Friedrich Reinitzer. It took more than two decades to decipher the complex structure of cholesterol. The credit for the same goes to Heinrich O. Wieland and Adolf Windaus who successfully established the structure through their brilliant work in early 1900s. Wieland was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1927 and Windaus in 1928. Cholesterol became a molecule of interest in the etiology of atherosclerosis when in 1910 Windaus reported that atherosclerotic plaques from aortas of human subjects contained over 20-fold higher concentrations of cholesterol than did normal aortas! Through following a number of patie