A Promising Drug: Bacteria, Antibiotics and Marketing in an Era of Economic Development

Abstract

On February 15, 1991, the weekly pages devoted to medicine and health in the Barcelona daily newspaper, La Vanguardia , included a brief report on the effects of the antibiotic fosfomycin in the treatment of urinary infections. The new antibiotic isolated and identified as part of the research programme was named phosphonomycin, later changed to fosfomycin and finally, for marketing within Spain, fosfocina. In this chapter, I relate the story of an expectation fulfilled by the production of a new drug, developed in the factory, the clinic and the research laboratory. The long life of this antibiotic, later retrieved and promoted for the treatment of urinary infections as if a recent discovery, began as the result of the new methods of detecting antimicrobial activity introduced in the early 1960s precisely as an outcome of the research on the action mechanism of penicillin in bacteria, transferred from a US laboratory to a Spanish pharmaceutical firm.