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Chinese scientist Tu Youyou discovered artemisinin, now one of the most effective malaria drugs. Her team had screened hundreds of traditional remedies; a fourth-century medical text led her to extract sweet wormwood without high heat, which kept the active compound intact.

Nobel Prize

HealthScience

The story behind the card

Tu worked for Project 523, a secret Chinese military programme launched in 1967 to find new malaria treatments, partly to help North Vietnamese soldiers suffering from drug-resistant malaria. Her team gathered some 2,000 traditional recipes and tested hundreds of plant extracts. Sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua) showed promise but gave inconsistent results. In a handbook of emergency remedies by the fourth-century writer Ge Hong, Tu found an instruction to soak the herb in water and drink its juice, with no boiling, and suspected that heat was destroying the active ingredient. A low-temperature extraction using ether worked in 1971. She shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery.

Türkçe oku
Çinli bilim insanı Tu Youyou, bugün en etkili sıtma ilaçlarından biri olan artemisinini buldu. Ekibi yüzlerce geleneksel ilacı denemişti; 4. yüzyıldan kalma bir tıp kitabı Tu'yu tatlı pelini yüksek ısıya maruz bırakmadan özütlemeye yöneltti ve etken madde bu sayede bozulmadan kaldı.

Tu, 1967'de yeni sıtma ilaçları bulmak için başlatılan gizli bir askerî program olan Proje 523'te çalışıyordu. Programın bir amacı, ilaçlara dirençli sıtmayla boğuşan Kuzey Vietnam askerlerine yardım etmekti. Ekibi 2.000 kadar geleneksel reçete topladı ve yüzlerce bitki özütünü denedi. Tatlı pelin (Artemisia annua) umut veriyordu ama sonuçları tutarsızdı. Tu, 4. yüzyılda yaşamış Ge Hong'un acil durumlar için yazdığı ilaç el kitabında, bitkinin suda bekletilip suyunun içilmesini öğütleyen ve kaynatmaktan hiç söz etmeyen bir tarif buldu; etken maddeyi ısının bozduğundan şüphelendi. 1971'de eterle düşük sıcaklıkta yapılan özütleme işe yaradı. Tu bu buluşla 2015 Nobel Fizyoloji veya Tıp Ödülü'nü paylaştı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Tu Youyou
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