1 Leu Cantacuzino Institute

Issued to mark the centenary of the Cantacuzino Institute, Romania's principal public health research body founded in 1921 by Ioan Cantacuzino — a bacteriologist trained under Élie Metchnikoff at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Cantacuzino developed an anti-cholera vaccine used on the Romanian front during World War I, administered to hundreds of thousands of soldiers. The Institute he founded went on to produce vaccines domestically through much of the 20th century, a capacity that became politically contentious during Communist-era centralization of pharmaceutical production.