Economic report on antibiotics manufacture.

  • United States Federal Trade Commission
Date:
1958
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Economic report on antibiotics manufacture. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    mals and in persons.” Dr. Florey brought his findings to the United States in 1941 and stimulated interest in the potential usefulness of the new drug for the Armed Forces. Research work on penicillin, already in progress at Columbia Uni- versity and the Mayo Clinic, was now undertaken at the Department of Agriculture’s Northern Regional Research Laboratory in Peoria, Ill. An Agriculture research team had previously worked out an im- provement in the deep-vat fermentation process which made possible its application to antibiotics. To this was now added the discovery that corn steep liquor could be used as a nutrient medium in the fer- mentation process. These two contributions of Department of Agri- culture scientists were significant in making volume production of penicillin possible. The United States Government organized the whole wartime re- search and production effort, beginning in 1941, through the Office of Scientific Research and Development and the War Production Board. Difficult problems in producing penicillin had first to be solved. Ap- proximately 20 pharmaceutical companies were authorized to enter the business, and most of them did get into production. Before the war ended, military needs had been met, and the drug was being made available in small quantities for civilian use. One feature of the wartime program was research into the chemi- cal structure and synthesis of penicillin, under contract with the Office of Scientific Research and Development, by several universities, the Department of Agriculture, and (without compensation) ten pharma- ceutical companies. In order to speed the research and interchange of results, the Office negotiated a plan for allocation of any resulting patent rights; but few of the patents actually issued were to prove important. Although synthesis of pencillin on a commercial scale was not achieved, the fermentation process became highly effective. In 19438 the Peoria group found a penicillin mold which increased the yield to about 100 times that of the original Fleming mold. This new mold was sent to the Carnegie Institution, which bombarded it with X-rays. A mutant strain was developed which increased the productivity of the Peoria mold about five times. Later, University of Wisconsin geneticists, using ultraviolet-ray bombardment, increased still further the productivity of this strain. By 1945 a new and dynamic branch of the ethical drug segment of the pharmaceutical industry had emerged as a result of wartime 2Drs. Fleming, Florey, and Chain were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physi- ology in 1945. In 1952 Dr. Selman A. Waksman was awarded this prize for the discovery of the second important antibiotic, streptomycin.