Historical Advances in Cholesterol Research

• Cholesterol was discovered in 1812 in gallstones by physicians in France and in Germany but no reference has been made to its discoverer(s).
• On August 26 1816, at a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences  the chemist Michel Chevreul suggested that a substance, with fat-like properties, should be named cholesterine, from the Greek: chole, bile, and stereos, solid. It later became known as cholesterol.
• Schoenheimer suggested in the 1930s that there was some kind of equilibrium between the amount of cholesterol which the cell itself synthesized and its dietary cholesterol. How this equilibrium was maintained was, however, completely unknown.
• Cholesterol appeared in medical text books in the 1940s but its role heart disease and stroke was not indentified until the late 1960s- early 70s.
• Bloch and by Lynen were awarded a Nobel Prize in 1964 for their discoveries concerning the mechanism and regulation of the cholesterol and fatty acid metabolism"

Konrad Bloch and Feodor Lynen

http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/1964/index.html

•  A 1981 article in the New England Journal of Medicine linked the consumption of large amounts of cholesterol to death from coronary occlusion.
• Brown and Goldstein were given the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1985 for their mechanism for "the regulation of cholesterol metabolism".

Michael S. Brown and Joseph L. Goldstein

http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/1985/index.html

Current Developments

Researchers at the Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin and the Centre de Neurochimie in Strasbourg, France, found in 2001 that cholesterol present in the brain plays a key role in the formation of contact points between neurons. This is vital to brain development and function and the research may lead to ways of treating synapse damage following an injury or the development of diseases such as Alzheimer's.

With regard to the treatment of high blood cholesterol levels, AstraZeneca is one company developing a second-generation or 'super' statin, ZD 4522 (licensed from Shionogi), in phase III trials. This statin has demonstrated impressive high-density lipoprotein ('good') cholesterol elevating ability and a clean side effect profile (i.e. no evidence of liver enzyme elevation).