The Waterbury Democrat., 1944-06-27
Packaging Penicillin
 For Public Underway
More Big Plants Lift Production of Wonder Drug From
 Bottles to T1ree-StOry-TaII Tanks

Penicillin for the public has be- come Q reality. More and more big new plants have lifted production of the wonder drug from bottles in the laboratory to three-story -tall tanks. Tn gleaming clean factories the mold is grown and processed in patches thought impossibly huge short months ago. This expansion of penicillin production from the bottle to the vat was itself triumph of technology. But the medicinal mold is delicate and unstable stutf.
 The other half of the penicillin problem was to concentrate great quantities of the drug so 1t would keep indefinitely in the little vials which carry its lifesaving power all over the world. Freezing the drug, then drying of the ice was the tech- nical answer. But the quantities planned demanded development of 3 whole process to handle such vol- tune.
 The story of how the much needed process was found begins last Sep tember. E. B. Badger & Sons Go. had just been charged with con- struction of one of the worlds larg- est penicillin plants for Commercial Solvents corporation at Terre Haute, Indiana. Needing help in solving the complicated vacuum engineer ing problems involved in nass-dry- ing the drug, they investigated a process which National Research corporation of Boston had worked out for dehydrating heat-sensitive materials under high vacuum.
 The process had been tested on a small scale, in the laboratory, on food. Would 1t work on a mass pro- duction basis, in @ factory, on pen- icillin? At that time the drug was so scarce that not even a small amount of 1t was available for tests to make sure. In spite of that, Commercial Solvents staked the cash, and Badger and National Re- search their regulations, that 1t would work.
 Time was as short as penicillin, Skipping the pilot plant stage, re- search, engineering and construc- ton were carried out simultaneously. Commercial Solvents gambled on it's faith in a scientific deduction, and its faith in those with whom the work was done. Faith won.
 When a request for priorities for equipment for the plant reached the War Production Board, William J. McManus, then head of the boards penicillin unit, also investi- gated the process. To Boston with him went the chief of the army medical schools blood research divi- sion, It. Col. Douglas B. Kendrick, and Capt. L. R. Newhouser of the Navy Medical Corps. Over the week. end they watched tests run on blood plasma in 8 pilot called a meat machine" because 1t had been built to study the dehydration of meat and other foods. A cabinet to hold the bottles of plasma was hooked up, the process began to function.
 It worked: The plasma was dried many times faster than by other methods, and the WIPE estimated that 1t would cut drying time and cost considerably on penicillin.
 Almost immediately the National Research process went into other plants being blue-printed for big production, and 1t was made royal ty-free for this vital work with peri- cillin. Soon the bulk of world pro- duction will come from the plants of Commercial Solvents Corp, Charles Pfizer Co.,, Inc, Heyden Chemical, Cheplin Laboratories, and Schenley Laboratories-plants using the High Vacuum Diffusion Process developed and engineered by Na- tional Research Corporation.
 Tn this process, the carefully cul- tured and concentrated solution of the drug is dried, while frozen, under high vacumn. Heart of the process is that moisture and air are pumped independently of each other, while the whole system of cabinets, mani- folds and ice chambers is kept under vacuum 30,000 times less than nor nal air pressure. Even so simple a thing .aS a valve must be specially