What are the statins and how do they work?

The statins are a group of drugs that owes its exsitence to the considerable efforts of Japanese and American biochemists working in the 1970s. Akira Endo and his colleagues in Japan first isolated the antibiotic mevastatin from the mould Penicillium citrinum in 1973, and they demonstrated that this novel compound lowered serum cholesterol levels in dogs by inhibiting the rate-limiting enzyme in cholesterol biosynthesis: hepatic 3-hydroxy-3-methyl glutaryl coenzyme A (HMG CoA) reductase.