Coumarin - Glycoside Antibiotics

Publisher Summary This chapter introduces coumarin—glycoside antibiotics, focusing on their production, therapeutic use and pharmacology, as well as their extraction, separation, and purification. Combinations of novobiocin with other antibiotics, such as tetracycline, sodium fusidate, and rifampicin were used to prevent emergence of drug resistance, but the evidence that they act synergistically has been seriously questioned. Although it is effective for the treatment of pneumococcal pneumonia, where penicillin is the drug of choice, it does not appear to have any other role in current therapeutics. Elimination of the cost of filtration is a feature of one or ion-exchange resins, commercial whole-beer process employing a counter current flow in columns charged with anion exchange resin. It should be pointed out that most of the extraction and isolation procedures described in the chapter are more suited for small-scale laboratory work. Although modifications of some of them may have been employed on large scale commercially for a time, production procedures generally shifted to less labor-consuming and decreased number of steps, which could be largely automated.