Penicillin: Key dates

1880s Joseph Lister noted that very little grew near the mould penicillium. He successfully
used penicillin to treat a young nurse who had an infected wound. However, he did
not use leave any notes on this case and stopped using the mould.

1928 Sir Alexander Fleming was a Scottish biologist and pharmacologist. On the
morning of September 3rd, 1928, Professor Alexander Fleming was having a clear up
of his cluttered laboratory. He was sorting through a number of glass plates that had
previously been coated with staphyloccus bacteria as part of research Fleming was
doing.

One of the plates had mould on it. The mould was in the shape of a ring and the
area around the ring seemed to be free of the bacteria staphyloccus. The mould was
penicillium notatum. Fleming published his findings in a research report in 1929.
Further research on the mould found that it could kill other bacteria and that it
could be given to small animals without any side effects. However, within a year,
Fleming had moved onto other medical issues because Fleming did not have the
research facilities to develop and test his ideas.

1930s Professor of Pathology at Oxford University: Howard Florey and Ernst Chain
who was a lecturer at Oxford and Biochemist became interested in Flemings 1929
paper about penicillin.

1939 In 1939, Florey and Chain started to investigate natural antibacterial agents
produced by microorganisms. This led him and Florey to revisit the work of
Alexander Fleming, who had described penicillin nine years earlier. Chain and Florey
went on to discover penicillin's therapeutic action and its chemical composition.
With the outbreak of the Second World War Florey asked the British government
for funding the teams research into penicillin. Norman Heatley suggested
transferring the active ingredient of penicillin back into water by changing its
acidity. This produced enough of the drug to begin testing on animals.

1940 The team developed a method of penicillin production. 1) Growing the penicillin
with the latest freeze drying technology and also with thousands of milk bottles to
grow the bacteria in. Slowly the teams grew a few grams of penicillin. 2) With this
small amount of penicillin it was tested on animals and injected into 8 mice that were
then injected with dangerous microbes. The four mice who had been injected with
penicillin survived.

1941 The team at Oxford had just sufficient penicillin to test on a patient. The test was
successful until the team ran out of penicillin. Production of penicillin was difficult in
Britain due to a shortage of funding and the threat of German bombing so in June
1941 Florey travelled to America to get interest from drug companies. Initially there
was little interest but after December 1941 Florey found it much easier to gain
funding.

1942 The American government gave $80million to four drug companies to find a way to
mass produce penicillin and in 1943 production began with the first use in was by
the British army in North Africa and by June 1944 there was enough penicillin to
treat all the casualties on D Day.

1945 By this stage the American army was using 2 million doses a month and it was
estimated that without penicillin casualties would have been 12-15% higher. Penicillin
also roughly halved the time Allied soldiers spent in hospital and soon after the war
penicillin was available for civilian use and called an antibiotic.

2000 Since the 1990s there are increasing numbers of antibiotic resistant diseases
spreading due to overuse of penicillin.