C mox 500

These trials were carried out in the Radcliffe Infirmary at Oxford by Charles Fletcher under Florey's supervision. The results, despite some initial setbacks, were spectacular and established beyond

doubt

This work may be regarded as the true dawn of the age of antibiotics.

As repeatedly pointed out by Florey himself, the work on penicillin in Oxford was graced by a great deal of good luck. The material used in the first animal experiments contained only a minute amount of pure penicillin, and it was amazingly fortunate that none of the impurities that constituted the bulk of the preparation was itself seriously toxic.

If, as subsequently happened with many other antibiotics, penicillin had proved toxic to man, as it is to the guinea-pig, it would have been, to put it in Florey's own words "just another chemical curiosity". In order to strengthen the chemical side of the work Florey attracted E. Abraham, who had recently completed his doctorate in the Department of Organic Chemistry at Oxford (the Dyson Perrins Laboratory) set about the difficult task of purifying penicillin and then determining its structure.

Abraham was eventually completely successful in both these aims, and was the first to propose the correct chemical structure for penicillin.

Abraham's structure, which involved the novel -lactam ring, was not accepted by Robert Robinson, the Head of the Dyson Perrins Laboratory or by J. Cornforth, then also working in that department; they proposed a thiazolidine-oxazolone structure. This matter was settled by Dorothy

Crowfoot

Robinson and his colleagues took the view that chemical synthesis of penicillin would eventually provide the most efficient means for its production and pursued that course.

Florey, on the other hand, stayed with biological methods of penicillin production and these have remained, to this day, the mainstay of the antibiotics industry. Abraham went on to work, with Guy Newton, in the discovery of the antibiotic cephalosporin. The patent income from cephalosporin enabled the esablishment of several charitable trusts for the support of biomedical research, including the E.P.

The prestigious Newton Abraham Visiting Professorship was established in 1980, with a donation from the E.P. Chain and Florey shared, with Fleming, the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1945.

AI Just Discovered a New Antibiotic to Kill the World’s Nastiest Bacteria. Penicillin, one of the greatest discoveries in the history of medicine, was a product of chance.

After returning from summer vacation in September 1928, bacteriologist Alexander Fleming found a colony of bacteria he’d left in his London lab had sprouted a fungus. Curiously, wherever the bacteria contacted the fungus, their cell walls broke down and they died. Fleming guessed the fungus was secreting something lethal to the bacteria—and the rest is

history

Fleming’s discovery of penicillin and its later isolation, synthesis, and scaling in the 1940s released a flood of antibiotic discoveries in the next few decades. Bacteria and fungi had been waging an ancient war against each other, and the weapons they’d evolved over eons turned out to be humanity’s best defense against bacterial infection and disease. In recent decades, however, the flood of new antibiotics has slowed to a trickle.

Their development is uneconomical for drug companies, and the low-hanging fruit has long been picked. We’re now facing the emergence of strains of super bacteria resistant to one or more antibiotics and an aging arsenal to fight them with.

Gone unchallenged, an estimated 700,000 deaths worldwide due to drug resistance could rise to as many as 10 million in 2050. Increasingly, scientists warn the tide is turning, and we need a new strategy to keep pace with the remarkably quick and boundlessly creative tactics of bacterial evolution.

But where the golden age of antibiotics

was

The team says their machine learning algorithm discovered a powerful new antibiotic. Named for the AI in 2001: A Space Odyssey ,

the

coli bacteria also failed to develop resistance to halicin, in stark contrast to existing antibiotic ciprofloxacin. “In terms of antibiotic discovery, this is absolutely a first,” Regina Barzilay, a senior author on the study and computer science professor at MIT, told The Guardian . The algorithm that discovered halicin was trained on the molecular features of 2,500 compounds.

Nearly half were FDA-approved drugs, and another 800 naturally occurring.

The researchers specifically tuned the algorithm to look for molecules with antibiotic properties but whose structures would differ from existing antibiotics (as halicin’s does).

Using another machine learning program, they screened the results for those likely to be safe for humans.

Early study suggests halicin attacks the bacteria’s cell membranes, disrupting their ability to produce energy. Protecting the cell membrane from halicin might take more than one or two genetic mutations, which could account for its impressive ability to prevent resistance.

“I think this is one of the more powerful antibiotics that has been discovered to date,” James Collins, an MIT professor of bioengineering and senior author told The Guardian .

“It has remarkable activity against a broad range of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.” Beyond tests in petri-dish bacterial colonies, the team also tested halicin in mice.