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We can now put a price on mold and it's around $14,617.

That's how much a dish full of 90-year-old mold went for at a London auction house on Wednesday. This wasn't just any mold though.

It was the fuzzy green sample that led to the creation of penicillin.

The patch of mold preserved in a small glass case comes from the laboratory of Dr. Alexander Fleming who is credited with discovering the world's first antibiotic in 1928 and subsequently saving millions of lives. The sample was auctioned from a collection owned by Fleming's niece.

"[He] sent these samples out to dignitaries and to people in the scientific world, almost as a kind of holy relic," Matthew Haley, director of books and manuscripts at Bonham Auction House told the Associated Press.

(MORE: Mold Problem Threatens Thousands of Artifacts at Mark Twain House and Museum)

Samples from Fleming's original fungus were sent to Pope Pius XII, Winston Churchill and Marlene Dietrich among others. The buyer of the sample this week has not been identified. The glass case containing the mold features Fleming's signature and a message that reads, “The mould that first made Penicillin."

This week's auction wasn't the first of its kind. In December, someone paid $46,250 for another one of Fleming's samples, according to Smithsonian Magazine.

The scientist's discovery of the miracle drug was largely an accident. Fleming had been away from his lab for a getaway at his country house. When he returned, he found a petri dish that was full of bacteria except for one spot where mold was growing. Upon further examination, he figured out that the mold, or penicillin, was killing the bacteria that surrounded it.

"Fleming noticed something that other people would have missed and saw the potential of penicillin to treat patients," Kevin Brown, archivist at the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum told The Associated Press.

The production of penicillin ramped up in the 1940s after the drug was further developed by researchers at Oxford University. Fleming was awarded the Nobel prize medicine along with Oxford scientists Ernst Boris Chain and Howard Walter in 1945.

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