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Production of antibiotics is a naturally occurring event, that thanks to advances in science can now be replicated and improved upon in laboratory settings. Due to the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming, and the efforts of Florey and Chain in 1938, large-scale, pharmaceutical production of antibiotics has been made possible.
Penicillin G (benzylpenicillin) was first produced from a penicillium fungus that occurs in nature. The strain of fungus used today for the manufacture of penicillin G was created by genetic engineering to improve the yield in the manufacturing process. None of the other natural penicillins (F, K, N, X, O, U1 or U6) are currently in clinical use.
The history of penicillin follows observations and discoveries of evidence of antibiotic activity of the mould Penicillium that led to the development of penicillins that became the first widely used antibiotics. Following the production of a relatively pure compound in 1942, penicillin was the first naturally-derived antibiotic.
Sample of penicillin mould presented by Alexander Fleming to Douglas Macleod in 1935. The discovery of penicillin was one of the most important scientific discoveries in the history of medicine. Ancient societies used moulds to treat infections and in the following centuries many people observed the inhibition of bacterial growth by moulds.
Large-scale production of penicillin prompted Gaden's doctoral dissertation topic. Gaden's paper explained to chemical engineers the fundamentals of the scientific process behind penicillin production. It also helped them determine how to quantify the amount of oxygen they would need for an effective fermentation.
Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau (27 October 1910 – 12 January 2000) was an American chemical engineer who designed the first commercial penicillin production plant. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] She was the first female member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers .
Although penicillin could be isolated from the mold in a laboratory setting, there was no known way to obtain the amount of medication needed to treat the quantity of people who needed it. Scientists with major chemical companies such as Pfizer were able to develop a deep-fermentation process which could produce a high yield of penicillin. In ...
In the fields of medicine, biotechnology, and pharmacology, drug discovery is the process by which new candidate medications are discovered. [1] Historically, drugs were discovered by identifying the active ingredient from traditional remedies or by serendipitous discovery, as with penicillin.