HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT OF ANTIMICROBIAL AGENTS

HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT OF ANTIMICROBIAL AGENTS

ANCIENT TIMES

                Many ancient cultures used molds, soil, and plants to treat bacterial infections. In Ancient Serbia, China and Greece, old moldy bread was pressed against wounds to prevent infection. In Egypt, crusts of moldy wheaten bread were applied on pustular scalp infections and “medicinal earth” was dispensed for its curative properties.

                These remedies were believed to influence the spirits or the gods responsible for illness and suffering. Today we know that the occasional efficacy of these early treatments was due to the active metabolites and chemicals present in these concoctions.

                At around 1550 BC, Egyptians have been recorded to use a concoction of honey, lard and lint for dressing wounds. We now know that honey actually contains substantial amounts of hydrogen peroxide which can kill bacteria.

                More than 2,000 years ago, moldy bread was used in China, Greece, Serbia, Egypt and probably other ancient civilizations as treatment for some disease conditions, particularly infected wounds. The observed curative powers may have been due to some raw forms of antibiotics produced by the mold growing on the bread.

Weapons against bacterial diseases improved just before the turn of the 20th century. The advent of the germ theory of disease, which proposed that microorganisms are the causes of many diseases, caused a revolutionary change in the understanding of the vital role of microbes in infectious diseases. Specific microbial pathogens were identified as the causative agents of many diseases, and a race immediately began to find effective means to kill these implicated microbes.

The first recorded microbial by-product shown to have antimicrobial activity was the blue pigment from Bacillus pyocyaneus (now Pseudomonas aeruginosa) which stopped the growth of some kinds of bacteria in the test tube. This was serendipitously observed by E. de Freudenreich (Germany) in 1888. Rudolf Emmerich and Oscar Loew (Germany), who later named the substance “pyocyanase”, performed clinical trials in 1889 showing some effectiveness against many of the infectious diseases of that time. This understandably raised excitement in the scientific community, however, this compound’s instability and inherent toxicity in patients later made it clear that pyocyanase had no real clinical application, and thus its popularity eventually declined.

Another German physician, named Paul Ehrlich, tirelessly searched for a “magic bullet” that could selectively kill microorganisms. After several failures, in 1910 he finally came up with an arsphenamine chemical dye they referred to as compund 606 and later named Salvarsan - the first chemical compound shown to cure a human disease, syphilis.

Alexander Fleming, more notable for his discovery of penicllin in the later years, reported in 1920 of a naturally occurring antibacterial substance in human tears that causes lysis in some bacterial cells. He later called this lysozyme. Unfortunately, this too did not realize clinical application because of its limited effect on mostly non-pathogenic bacteria, and because it could not be produced in quantities large enough for further trials.

GOLDEN AGE OF ANTIBACTERIALS