Mevastatin

Mevastatin (compactin, ML-236B) is a hypolipidemic agent that belongs to the statins class.

It was isolated from the mold Penicillium citrinum by Akira Endo in the 1970s, and he identified it as a HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor, i.e., a statin. Mevastatin might be considered the first statin drug; clinical trials on mevastatin were performed in the late 1970s in Japan, but it was never marketed. The first statin drug available to the general public was lovastatin.