1935

Introduction of sulfa drugs (sulfonamides), following Bayer’s Gerhard Domagk’s discovery of an orange-red azo dye (an azo dye to which a sulfonamide radical had been added =Sulfamidochrysoidine = Prontosil) that protected mice from streptococcal infections (causative in most wound infections, childbed fever, tonsillitis, endocarditis, appendicitis, many kidney & joint conditions) (Lesch III, 60-61). “A considerable body of literature from the 1910s and 1920s pointed to the antibacterial effects in vitro of azo compounds. By the early 1930s, several azo compounds had been recommended for use in urinary tract disinfection” (Lesch III, 59). Researchers at Pasteur Institute soon discovered the active antibacterial agent was sulfanilamide (Lax, 48-50, Dowling, 107-08, Lesch III, 123-132). Within Pasteur Institute, reception to discovery outside of Fourneau’s service was cool, perhaps because it threated the Institute income from development of vaccines and serums: “By early 1936, Prontosil/Rubiazol had already begun to render antistreptococcal serums obsolete, and the prospect that other serums, for meningococcal and pneumococcal infections, dysentery, and plague, would suffer similar fates was clearly discernible” (Lesch III, 131). Calco Chemical Co., a dye-making company in Bound Brook, NJ, a division of American Cyanamid Co., first American firm to begin research on sulfonamide drugs; its highly effective sulfanilamide was sent to physicians and researchers in fall of 1936 and commercial delivery began in February 1937 (Travis).