Eli Lilly pharmaceutical

Researchers from Eli Lilly pharmaceuticals, (a company founded in 1876 by Colonel Eli Lilly veteran of the US Civil War), undertook further intensive phytochemical studies and characterized 60 alkaloids, of which a group of 20 binary indole alkaloids—including vincristine and vinblastine. Vinblastine sulphate (Velbe ) inhibits the polymerization of tubulin and is used to treat generalized Hodgkin s disease and chorionepithelioma, whereas vincristine sulphate (Oncovin ) is used to treat leukemia in children. 

Just as hydrogen bonds are critical in the pairing of nucleotides, they also play a major role in how one of the world s most powerful antibiotics kills bacteria. That antibiotic is vancomycin, a compound first isolated in 1956 by scientists at the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical company from the fermentation broth of a microbe found in the jungles of Borneo. Its name was derived from the verb to vanquish, because it could kill every strain of gram-positive bacteria thrown at it, including the deadly strain known as MRSA (for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), one of the so-called flesh-eating bacteria. 

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