Beginnings of Modern Pharmaceutical Industry

Despite the advances made in the 1800s, there were only a few drugs available for treating diseases at the beginning of the 1900s. These were  

More systematic research was being performed to discover new drugs from the early 1900s. 

In the 1930s, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain worked with a team of scientists at Oxford University in Britain. Ernst Chain discovered an earlier paper by Alexander Fleming on the anti-bacterial properties of penicillin. 

The Florey-Chain team s investigation showed that penicillin interferes with the cell wall of bacteria. Bacteria cells ruptured instead of continuing to grow. In 1938, their animal test, on eight mice given lethal doses of infectious bacteria, showed stunning results. The four mice with penicillin survived, whereas four controls with no medication died. Their first human patient who suffered from infection showed early improvement with penicillin, but died subsequently when the stock of penicillin was exhausted. 

The team worked on the technology for large-scale production of penicillin. Commercial quantities were available before the end of World War II and saved millions of lives, especially soldiers wounded in the war. 

In the late 1700s, Jenner heard that people who worked with cattle and had caught the cowpox disease (a mild disease related to smallpox) were immune and never caught smallpox. In 1796, he proceeded to inoculate a boy using the fluid from the blister of a woman with cowpox. The boy developed cowpox. Two months later, Jenner inoculated the boy with fluids from the blister of a smallpox sufferer. The boy became immune and did not get smallpox. 

Through his work, Jenner invented vaccination and saved many lives. However, in today s regulatory control, Jenner s method would not have been approved. 

Source BBC. Medicine Through Time, Edward Jenner (1749-1823). http //www.bbc.co.uk/ education/medicine/nonint/indust/dt/indtbi2.shtml [accessed May 25,2002]. 

In 1796, Edward Jenner successfully experimented with smallpox inoculations (Exhibit A1.3). This paved the way for the use of vaccination against some infectious diseases. 

In the late 1700s, William Withering introduced digitalis, an extract from the plant foxglove, for treatment of cardiac problems. 

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A1.2 Drug Discovery and Development in the Middle Ages A1.3 Foundation of Current Drug Discovery and Development A1.4 Beginnings of Modern Pharmaceutical Industry A1.5 Evolution of Drug Products A1.6 Further Reading... 

Penicillin, the first (3-lactam antibiotic, marked the beginning of a revolutionary period of successful treatment of infectious disease and, in many respects, the beginning of the modern pharmaceutical industry. With more than 6 decades of history, the (3-lactam core remains an important antibacterial pharmacophore. 

As with acid-base and complexation titrations, redox titrations are not frequently used in modern analytical laboratories. Nevertheless, several important applications continue to find favor in environmental, pharmaceutical, and industrial laboratories. In this section we review the general application of redox titrimetry. We begin, however, with a brief discussion of selecting and characterizing redox titrants, and methods for controlling the analyte s oxidation state. 

My basic purpose in this volume is, as it was in Inventing the Electronic Century, to undertake the fundamental task of the historian to record when, where, and by whom scientific and technical knowledge were commercialized into new products that created a wide variety of manmade materials central to the shaping of a modern industrial economy and manmade pharmaceuticals that sustained modern medicine. I do this by focusing on the relative successes and failures of the first movers and their close followers in the national industries of Europe and the United States. (That of Japan competed successfully in chemicals or pharmaceuticals only in Asia.) I review these histories from their beginnings through the end of the twentieth century. 

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