What are antibiotics made from? What are the actual ingredients?
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Antibiotics are a natural or artificial chemical that selectively kills bacteria and can be delivered into a living body without killing the patient. The first antibiotics (like penicillin) were identified as being produced by other living things – molds that were competing with bacteria for food, or plants that were preventing bacterial infection.
Other antibiotics were found – some were chemical modifications of existing antibiotics, others were identified by investigating the molecular functioning of bacteria.
This gives us a couple of approaches to mass production of antibiotics.
The first was used to produce penicillin – selection of the original mold, selective breeding to get higher output of penicillin, and large growth tanks from which penicillin was purified. This is slow, and during the first few trials of penicillin, they collected the urine of the patient to purify the excreted penicillin for reuse. Now, such biologically-sourced antibiotics would be synthesized in a production facility, or the genes for the antibiotic would be inserted into a suitable organism that can be grown easily and produces high yield output.
The second approach is synthesis from feedstock. Organic chemists use a variety of complex synthesis steps on various starting precursors (many initially extracted from crude oil as part of the refining process) to create the complex molecules that form antibiotics. This is faster than using genetically modified organisms to produce output, but can also be complex, delicate and dangerous – the conditions required for some organic chemistry reactions involve reactive chemicals and high temperatures. There may be multiple refining/cleaning steps and quality checking the end product is vital.
The actual medication you take will be an active antibiotic, usually a filler to bulk out the pill, maybe a release control coating or layers, and possibly additives that enhance or assist the antibiotic effects.
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