When was penicillin discovered?
587780#2
Alexander Fleming had first discovered penicillin by accident in 1928, but at that time believed it had little application. When Florey and his team recognised the potential of the discovery for combating bacterial infection, they faced the problem of how to manufacture penicillin in sufficient quantities to be of use. Heatley, although the junior member of the team, possessed a natural gift for ingenuity and invention. It was he who suggested transferring the active ingredient of penicillin back into water by changing its acidity, thus purifying the penicillin.
Norman Heatley
44870708#3
During World War II, Bushnell Hospital treated approximately 13,000 military patients with various illnesses and injuries, and in 1944, it housed 3,286 GI–patients. The U.S. Army designated Bushnell Hospital as the military’s first center for the study of penicillin’s possible use. On April 1, 1943, the first shipment of penicillin arrived at Bushnell, and during the War, it administered penicillin more than any other institution in the United States. In addition to administering some of the first doses of penicillin, Ingram promoted its use to the surrounding Brigham community. In speech by then-Captain Alvin Ingram to the Rotary Club of Brigham City, he explained how penicillin was discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming, and extolled recent successes of administering the drug at nearby Bushnell Hospital. According to historian Richard Polenberg, “[w]artime advances in medicine, particularly in the production of penicillin (which first became generally available for civilian use in the spring of 1944) saved countless [military and civilian] lives.
Alvin Ingram
369155#20
For decades biologists had been at work on the medicine that became penicillin. In 1928, Scottish biologist Alexander Fleming discovered a substance that killed a number of disease-causing bacteria. In 1929, he named the new substance "penicillin". His publications were largely ignored at first, but it became a significant antibiotic in the 1930s. In 1930, Cecil George Paine, a pathologist at Sheffield Royal Infirmary, used penicillin to treat sycosis barbae, eruptions in beard follicles, but was unsuccessful. Moving on to ophthalmia neonatorum, a gonococcal infection in infants, he achieved the first recorded cure with penicillin, on November 25, 1930. He then cured four additional patients (one adult and three infants) of eye infections, but failed to cure a fifth.
Roaring Twenties
23312#0
Penicillin (PCN or pen) is a group of antibiotics which include penicillin G (intravenous use), penicillin V (use by mouth), procaine penicillin, and benzathine penicillin (intramuscular use). Penicillin antibiotics were among the first medications to be effective against many bacterial infections caused by staphylococci and streptococci. They are still widely used today, though many types of bacteria have developed resistance following extensive use.
About 10% of people report that they are allergic to penicillin; however, up to 90% of this group may not actually be allergic. Serious allergies only occur in about 0.03%. All penicillins are β-lactam antibiotics.
Penicillin was discovered in 1928 by Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming. People began using it to treat infections in 1942. There are several enhanced penicillin families which are effective against additional bacteria; these include the antistaphylococcal penicillins, aminopenicillins and the antipseudomonal penicillins. They are derived from "Penicillium" fungi.
Penicillin
1937#15
Fleming also discovered very early that bacteria developed antibiotic resistance whenever too little penicillin was used or when it was used for too short a period. Almroth Wright had predicted antibiotic resistance even before it was noticed during experiments. Fleming cautioned about the use of penicillin in his many speeches around the world. On 26 June 1945, he made the following cautionary statements: "the microbes are educated to resist penicillin and a host of penicillin-fast organisms is bred out ... In such cases the thoughtless person playing with penicillin is morally responsible for the death of the man who finally succumbs to infection with the penicillin-resistant organism. I hope this evil can be averted." He cautioned not to use penicillin unless there was a properly diagnosed reason for it to be used, and that if it were used, never to use too little, or for too short a period, since these are the circumstances under which bacterial resistance to antibiotics develops.
Alexander Fleming
21115942#1
Recognition of antibiotic tolerance dates back to 1944 when Joseph Bigger, an Irish physician working in England, was experimenting with the recently discovered penicillin. Bigger used penicillin to lyse a suspension of bacteria and then inoculated culture medium with the penicillin-treated liquid. Colonies of bacteria were able to grow after antibiotic killing. The important observation that Bigger made was that this new population could again be killed by penicillin except for a small residual population. Hence the residual organisms were not antibiotic resistant mutants but rather a subpopulation of what he called ‘persisters’. The formation of persisters is now known to be a common phenomenon that can occur by the formation of persister cells prior to the antibiotic treatment or in response to a variety of antibiotics.
Multidrug tolerance
11120809#5
In 1959, Brockham Park became famous when Beecham scientists there discovered the penicillin nucleus, 6-APA (6-aminopenicillanic acid); This discovery allowed Beecham, working in tandem with Bristol-Myers, to synthesize of a number of new semisynthetic penicillins. Beecham marketed Broxil (phenethicillin), followed shortly by the more potent Celbenin (methicillin), which was active against "Staphylococcus aureus". The group continued to focus on pharmaceutical development, producing further semi-synthetic penicillins. However, when Penbritin (ampicillin) came on the market in 1961, Beecham's facilities were soon inadequate for the worldwide demand the drug generated. A complex at Worthing came on line in the early 1960s to produce phenethicillin, followed by the ability to produce 6-APA, the base for semisynthetic penicillins.
Beecham Group
1805#42
Ernst Chain, Howard Florey and Edward Abraham succeeded in purifying the first penicillin, penicillin G, in 1942, but it did not become widely available outside the Allied military before 1945. Later, Norman Heatley developed the back extraction technique for efficiently purifying penicillin in bulk. The chemical structure of penicillin was first proposed by Abraham in 1942 and then later confirmed by Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin in 1945. Purified penicillin displayed potent antibacterial activity against a wide range of bacteria and had low toxicity in humans. Furthermore, its activity was not inhibited by biological constituents such as pus, unlike the synthetic sulfonamides. (see below) The development of penicillin led to renewed interest in the search for antibiotic compounds with similar efficacy and safety. For their successful development of penicillin, which Fleming had accidentally discovered but could not develop himself, as a therapeutic drug, Chain and Florey shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Fleming.
Antibiotic
38642855#5
Hobby is recognized for her work in creating a form of penicillin that was effective on human hosts. In 1940, Hobby and her colleagues, Dr. Karl Meyer and Dr. Martin Henry Dawson, wrote to Howard Florey and Ernst Chain to procure a sample of penicillin. They naively decided to make some penicillin and soon became experts in the fermentation process, and began refining it into a drug. Hobby, Meyer, and Dawson performed the first tests of penicillin on humans in 1940 and 1941, before presenting at the American Society for Clinical Investigation. They discovered that penicillin was a powerful germ-killer that reduced the severity of infectious diseases and made procedures such as organ transplantation and open-heart surgery possible. Their findings received media coverage, which helped attract funding from the United States Government to mass-produce penicillin during World War II, saving the lives of many soldiers.
Gladys Lounsbury Hobby
23312#18
Despite the lack of interest of his fellow scientists, he did conduct several experiments on the antibiotic substance he discovered. The most important result proved it was nontoxic in humans by first performing toxicity tests in animals and then on humans. His subsequent experiments on penicillin's response to heat and pH allowed Fleming to increase the stability of the compound. The one test that modern scientists would find missing from his work was the test of penicillin on an infected animal, the results of which would likely have sparked great interest in penicillin and sped its development by almost a decade.
The importance of his work has been recognized by the placement of an International Historic Chemical Landmark at the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum in London on November 19, 1999.
Penicillin
15947535#2
In 1958, Beecham scientists in the UK discovered the penicillin nucleus, 6-APA. From that starting material, a large number of new semisynthetic penicillins could be designed, whose activity was directed against problem infections.
6-APA