Timeline of Antibiotics
Antibacterial medicine from honey dressings in an Egyptian papyrus of about 1600 BCE through Salvarsan, penicillin and the mid-20th-century golden age of discovery to drug resistance, global targets and new antibiotics in 2025.
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- 31 events ~1600 BCE – 2025
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- by claude-opus-5-5
~1600 BCE: Egyptian surgical papyrus prescribes honey for wounds
The Edwin Smith Papyrus, an Egyptian copy of an older surgical text, repeatedly prescribed lint soaked in an ointment of grease and honey, bound on daily, for wounds and injuries. Its authors knew nothing of microbes, but honey was later found to inhibit many bacteria, and honey dressings are still used in wound care.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Smith_Papyrus~350 – 550: Nubians consume tetracycline, probably in grain or beer
Bones from an X-Group (post-Meroitic) cemetery in Sudanese Nubia show the fluorescence of the antibiotic tetracycline, reported in 1980 and confirmed by mass spectrometry in 2010. The likeliest source was grain or beer contaminated with tetracycline-producing Streptomyces bacteria; whether the Nubians took it knowingly remains debated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetracycline~950: Bald's Leechbook records an eye salve for styes
Bald's Leechbook, an Old English medical compilation, told readers to pound garlic and another allium, mix them with wine and ox bile, and leave the mixture in a brass vessel for nine nights to treat a "wen", probably a stye. A 2015 reconstruction at the University of Nottingham killed Staphylococcus aureus in laboratory biofilms and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in infected mouse wounds, though no ingredient worked as well alone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bald%27s_Leechbook1910: Ehrlich and Hata introduce Salvarsan for syphilis
Paul Ehrlich's laboratory screened hundreds of synthetic arsenic compounds for a "magic bullet" that would kill a microbe but spare the patient; in 1909 Sahachiro Hata found that compound 606, made by Alfred Bertheim in 1907, cured syphilis in rabbits. Hoechst marketed it as Salvarsan, and it and the easier-to-use Neosalvarsan remained the standard syphilis treatments until penicillin replaced them in the 1940s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsphenamine1928: Fleming notices a mold killing staphylococci
Returning from a summer holiday to St Mary's Hospital in London, Alexander Fleming saw that bacteria had failed to grow around a mold, later identified as Penicillium rubens, on a Staphylococcus culture plate. He named the substance penicillin and published in 1929, but his assistants could not purify it. Others, such as Vincenzo Tiberio in 1895, had reported antibacterial molds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_penicillin1935: Domagk reports Prontosil, the first sulfa drug
Gerhard Domagk of Bayer, part of the IG Farben conglomerate, reported in February that Prontosil, a red dye made by Josef Klarer and Fritz Mietzsch, had cured mice of lethal streptococcal infections in tests from 1932. A Pasteur Institute team then showed the body converts it to sulfanilamide, an old, off-patent compound, and cheap sulfa drugs spread rapidly. Nazi authorities made Domagk decline his 1939 Nobel Prize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prontosil1937: Elixir Sulfanilamide deaths prompt a US drug-safety law
The S. E. Massengill Company of Bristol, Tennessee, dissolved the new sulfa drug sulfanilamide in diethylene glycol, a chemical used as antifreeze, without testing it for toxicity; its "Elixir Sulfanilamide" killed more than 100 people in 15 states that autumn. The outcry led to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, which required makers to submit evidence that new drugs were safe before selling them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir_sulfanilamide1939: Dubos finds tyrothricin by searching soil microbes
René Dubos at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, reasoning that soil must harbor microbes that destroy bacteria, fed soil with staphylococci, pneumococci and streptococci and isolated Bacillus brevis, whose extract tyrothricin, a mix of gramicidin and tyrocidine, killed many Gram-positive bacteria. Too toxic to inject, it was used on wounds, and Howard Florey credited it with reviving his work on penicillin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrothricin1940: Oxford team shows penicillin protects infected mice
Howard Florey's team at the University of Oxford, including Ernst Chain and Norman Heatley, purified enough penicillin to show on May 25 that it saved mice injected with lethal streptococci, and reported in The Lancet in August. Their first patient with an infection, the policeman Albert Alexander, improved in February 1941 but died in March when the supply ran out. Fleming, Florey and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_penicillin1940: Abraham and Chain find a penicillin-destroying enzyme
Edward Abraham and Ernst Chain at Oxford reported in Nature that some bacteria, including Escherichia coli, make an enzyme that destroys penicillin, before the drug was in general clinical use. Such penicillinases, members of the beta-lactamase family of enzymes that break penicillin's beta-lactam ring, became the main way Staphylococcus aureus resisted penicillin, and the ability to make them spread quickly among bacteria.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta-lactamase1941 – 1944: Penicillin production scaled up in the United States
Howard Florey and Norman Heatley flew to the United States in mid-1941, where Andrew Moyer at the Department of Agriculture's Northern Regional Research Laboratory in Peoria, Illinois, raised yields tenfold with corn steep liquor, and the laboratory found a productive strain on a moldy cantaloupe. Drug firms such as Pfizer developed deep-tank fermentation, and by the Normandy landings of June 1944 penicillin was available to treat wounded Allied troops.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_penicillin1943: Schatz and Waksman isolate streptomycin
Albert Schatz, a graduate student in Selman Waksman's laboratory at Rutgers University, isolated streptomycin from the soil bacterium Streptomyces griseus in October; reported in January 1944, it became the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis. Such soil screening yielded most antibiotics of the mid-century "golden age". Schatz won a settlement over credit in 1950, but Waksman alone received the 1952 Nobel Prize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streptomycin1945: Brotzu finds a cephalosporin-producing mold in Sardinia
Giuseppe Brotzu, a microbiologist at the University of Cagliari in Sardinia, isolated in July a Cephalosporium mold from coastal water near a sewage outfall that inhibited bacteria, including the typhoid bacillus. He published in 1948 and, lacking support in Italy, sent the culture to Howard Florey at Oxford, where Edward Abraham and Guy Newton isolated cephalosporin C in the 1950s; Eli Lilly launched the first cephalosporin drug, cefalotin, in 1964.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalosporin1945: Hodgkin confirms penicillin's beta-lactam ring
Using X-ray crystallography at Oxford, Dorothy Hodgkin and colleagues including Barbara Low showed that penicillin contains a four-membered beta-lactam ring, as Edward Abraham had proposed, contrary to much expert opinion. The structure, published in 1949, identified the ring that penicillinase enzymes break and guided later semisynthetic penicillins; Hodgkin received the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Hodgkin1947: Barber documents spreading penicillin-resistant staphylococci
Two years after Alexander Fleming warned in his Nobel lecture that underdosing could make microbes resistant, Mary Barber at Hammersmith Hospital in London reported a fast-rising share of hospital infections caused by penicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus that made a penicillin-destroying enzyme. Using phage typing, she later traced resistant strains spreading through wards and argued for restrained antibiotic use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Barber_(bacteriologist)1948: British trial randomizes streptomycin for tuberculosis
Britain's Medical Research Council published a trial of streptomycin for pulmonary tuberculosis in which a random allocation scheme devised by statistician Austin Bradford Hill assigned patients to bed rest with or without the drug. Concealing forthcoming assignments from clinicians helped make it a model for later randomized trials. Many patients developed resistant infections, and a follow-up trial found that adding para-aminosalicylic acid curbed resistance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_Bradford_Hill1948: Duggar reports Aureomycin, the first tetracycline
Benjamin Duggar, an emeritus botany professor working in Yellapragada Subbarow's department at Lederle Laboratories, described chlortetracycline (Aureomycin), named for its golden-yellow color, from Streptomyces aureofaciens, which he had cultured in 1945 from University of Missouri soil. It and chloramphenicol, isolated in 1947 from Streptomyces venezuelae, acted against a wider range of bacteria than penicillin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlortetracycline1949: Antibiotics found to speed livestock growth
Seeking cheap vitamin B12 for animal feed in fermentation wastes, Thomas Jukes and colleagues at American Cyanamid's Lederle Laboratories found that the antibiotic residues made animals gain weight faster, a result announced late in the year. Low-dose antibiotic feed spread worldwide; Sweden banned growth promoters in 1986 and the European Union in 2006, and the United States barred medically important antibiotics for growth promotion from 2017.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock1952: Eli Lilly introduces erythromycin from Philippine soil
Eli Lilly researchers described erythromycin, the first macrolide antibiotic in wide medical use, made by a soil bacterium now named Saccharopolyspora erythraea in a sample from Iloilo in the Philippines. The soil came from Abelardo Aguilar, a Filipino physician working for Lilly who later sought credit and royalties without success; drug companies of the era screened soil gathered from around the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erythromycin1958: Vancomycin from Borneo soil approved in the US
Eli Lilly chemists led by Edmund Kornfeld isolated vancomycin in 1953 from a microbe in soil that a missionary collected on Borneo for the company's worldwide sampling program, and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) then approved it. Sidelined at first as toxic, it became a mainstay against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) from the 1970s; resistant enterococci were reported in England and France in 1988.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancomycin1959 – 1960: Japanese researchers find transferable drug resistance
Investigating dysentery outbreaks in which Shigella bacteria had become resistant to several drugs at once since the mid-1950s, two Japanese research groups showed that the whole set of resistances could pass from Escherichia coli to Shigella by contact between cells. First met with skepticism in the West, these transferable "R factors", later identified as plasmids, explained how resistance genes spread between different bacteria.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmid-mediated_resistance#R-factor1961: MRSA reported soon after methicillin's introduction
Beecham researchers in Britain isolated the penicillin core, 6-aminopenicillanic acid, opening the way to semisynthetic penicillins such as methicillin, introduced in 1959 to resist staphylococcal penicillinase. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) appeared within about a year and was described in the British Medical Journal in January; genome studies later dated the first lineage to the mid-1940s, selected by penicillin, and traced others to hedgehogs before the antibiotic era.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphylococcus_aureus1962: Lesher's team reports nalidixic acid, the first quinolone
George Lesher and colleagues described nalidixic acid, a synthetic drug later used for urinary tract infections and regarded as the first quinolone antibacterial; its origin is usually traced to a by-product of making the antimalarial chloroquine, but few details were published. Adding fluorine produced the more potent fluoroquinolones, such as Kyorin's norfloxacin, disclosed in Japan in 1979, and Bayer's ciprofloxacin of 1987.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalidixic_acid2000: FDA approves linezolid, the first oxazolidinone antibiotic
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved linezolid, developed by Pharmacia & Upjohn, on April 18 for infections including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant enterococci. A fully synthetic drug from a chemical class DuPont scientists had described in 1987, it was one of very few new antibiotic classes to reach patients after the 1960s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linezolid2009: NDM-1 enzyme found to destroy carbapenems
Researchers described New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase 1 (NDM-1) in Klebsiella pneumoniae from a Swedish patient who had picked up a urinary infection in New Delhi; it destroys almost all beta-lactam antibiotics, including the carbapenems, often reserved as last-line drugs since imipenem's approval in 1985. Carried on an easily transferred stretch of DNA, it was soon reported in South Asia, Britain and many other countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Delhi_metallo-beta-lactamase_12015: Teixobactin discovered in an uncultured soil bacterium
Researchers led by Kim Lewis at Northeastern University reported that Eleftheria terrae, a previously unculturable bacterium from a field in Maine, grown in its own soil inside a device called the iChip, makes teixobactin, which binds cell-wall building blocks. Easily cultured soil microbes had been largely mined out by the 1960s; Staphylococcus aureus and Mycobacterium tuberculosis showed no detectable resistance in tests.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teixobactin2015: Chinese researchers find transferable colistin resistance
Surveillance of Escherichia coli from food animals in China found mcr-1, the first known plasmid-borne gene for resistance to colistin, a last-resort polymyxin antibiotic. Reported in November, it was carried by bacteria in about a fifth of animals and 1% of hospital patients sampled in 2011 – 2014 and was soon found in more than 30 countries; China moved in 2016 to ban colistin as a livestock feed additive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCR-12020: Deep learning flags halicin as an antibiotic candidate
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology led by James Collins and Regina Barzilay trained a neural network to predict antibacterial activity and used it to screen chemical libraries. It flagged halicin, a compound once studied for diabetes, which killed many drug-resistant bacteria and cleared pan-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii infections in mice; named after HAL in "2001: A Space Odyssey", it remained experimental.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halicin2022: Global study estimates deaths from resistant bacteria
A study by the Antimicrobial Resistance Collaborators in The Lancet estimated that bacterial resistance directly caused 1.27 million deaths in 2019 (95% uncertainty interval 0.91 – 1.71 million) and was associated with 4.95 million (3.62 – 6.57 million). Six pathogens, led by Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus, accounted for most of them, and the death rate was highest in western sub-Saharan Africa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_resistance2024: UN declaration targets deaths from drug resistance
At the second United Nations General Assembly high-level meeting on antimicrobial resistance, after one in 2016, world leaders approved a political declaration on September 26 aiming to reduce deaths associated with bacterial resistance by 10% by 2030, using the estimated 4.95 million deaths in 2019 as the baseline. It built on a Global Action Plan adopted by the World Health Assembly in 2015, which member states updated for 2026 – 2036 in May 2026.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_resistance2025: FDA approves two new oral gonorrhea antibiotics
On December 11 and 12 the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved gepotidacin, GSK's drug first cleared in March for urinary tract infections, and zoliflodacin, a first-in-class spiropyrimidinetrione developed by Innoviva with the nonprofit Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership (GARDP), for uncomplicated urogenital gonorrhea amid rising drug resistance. Thailand approved zoliflodacin about six months later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoliflodacin