Fosfomycin: 50 Years of A Great Discovery (1969-2019)

Fosfomycin has been with us for more than 50 years; however the history of its discovery is largely unknown. The objective of this article is to recover and make known its lost history.

Retrospective review study on the history of the discovery of fosfomycin based on articles and documents located in Medline/PubMed and Google between 1945 and 2020. For the search of articles in PubMed the MeSH keywords fosfomycin OR fosfomycin history, fosfomycin discovery, Streptomyces fradiae, and in Google the free terms; fosfomycin, fosfomycin history, fosfomycin discovery, Streptomyces fradiae were used. All the papers found were reviewed and those containing any historical review of interest to this research were selected for study.

We found 3500 articles on fosfomycin, of which 32 (0.9%) dealt with some aspect related to its discovery, and 21 corresponded to its history (0.6%), divided between 13 publications and 7 press releases, 8 to the genus Streptomyces (0.2%) and 3 to fosfomycin (0.1%).

The story of the discovery of fosfomycin begins with the finding of the bacterium Streptomyces fradiae in a soil sample from mount Montgó between Dénia and Jávea (Alicante). There is little published literature and the existing one is mostly incomplete. Some medical publications and press releases have made it possible to recover its history.