Antibiotics treat bacterial infections by killing bacteria and preventing them from spreading inside the body. Antibiotics revolutionised medicine in the 20th century, but they have been around for longer than you might realise.
This blog will unpack the history of antibiotics, from ancient medicine to the discovery of antibiotic medicines that are still widely used today.
Early Antibiotics
During ancient times, many civilisations in places like Egypt, China, Serbia and Rome used topical applications of mouldy bread, soil and even animal faeces to treat infections. The Eber’s papyrus, an Egyptian medical papyrus from 1550 BC, is the oldest document describing these ancient infection treatments.
However, it was John Parkinson who first documented the use of mould to treat infections in 1640.
The Start of the Antibiotic Era
It wasn’t until the 1880s that scientists began to explore synthetic antibiotic medicine i.e. man-made drugs that fight bacteria. Most notably, a German physician named Paul Ehrlich started examining the antibacterial effects of dyes and discovered the chemical arsphenamine in 1910. This chemical was soon proven to be an effective treatment of the sexually-transmitted disease syphilis, and thus the first antimicrobial agent was born.
The Discovery of Penicillin
In 1928, Dr Alexander Fleming returned home from a holiday to find mould growing on a Petri dish of Staphylococcus bacteria. He noticed that the mould appeared to be preventing the bacteria from growing, so he isolated it and identified it as a member of the Penicillium genus. He soon realised that the mould could produce a self-defence chemical that killed bacteria. Fleming then extracted that substance and named it penicillin.
Fleming realised that penicillin had great potential, but he struggled to translate what he could see in the laboratory into a medicine that could be made widely available. After giving up for a number of years, a pharmacologist and pathologist working in Oxford called Howard Florey caught wind of Fleming’s observations and published a paper in 1940 that described a penicillin purification technique.
By 1945, penicillin was being mass-produced and widely distributed for the treatment of bacterial infections. This was the start of the ‘golden age of antibiotics’, when many of the antibiotics we still use today were discovered, and the death rate from infectious diseases began to plummet.
Antibiotic Resistance
Of course, too much of a good thing can be detrimental. By the 1970s, due to overuse of existing antibiotics combined with the slowing rate of new antibiotic discovery, antibiotic-resistant bacteria were beginning to evolve.
The World Health Organisation has classified antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as a "serious threat [that] is no longer a prediction for the future, it is happening right now in every region of the world and has the potential to affect anyone, of any age, in any country". Each year, AMR is a contributing factor in nearly 5 million deaths worldwide.
The fight against antibiotic resistance calls for an urgent need to discover new classes of antibiotics that will treat multidrug-resistant bacterial infections.
Do you want to be part of the fight against antibiotic resistance? Here at HRS, we specialise in finding innovative individuals to fill roles within the life sciences industry. Search the latest roles to find vacancies in microbiology and other fields.
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