Medicinal chemistry => Malaria treatment

Tu Youyou is a Nobel Prize-winning Chinese pharmaceutical chemist. She discovered effective remedies to treat malaria, a breakthrough in twentieth-century tropical medicine, saving millions of lives in South China, Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America.

Tu was born in Zhejiang, China, in 1930. A tuberculosis infection interrupted her high-school education, but inspired her to go into medical research.

In 1955, Tu Youyou graduated from Beijing Medical University School of Pharmacy and continued her research on Chinese herbal medicine in the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences. Later Tu was trained for two and a half years in traditional Chinese medicine.

During her early years in research, Tu studied Lobelia chinensis, a traditional Chinese medicine believed to be useful for treating an infection of the urinary tract or the intestines, which was widespread in the first half of the 20th century in South China.

In early 1969, Tu was appointed head of the (secret) Project 523 research group at her institute. The focus of Project 523 was Malaria, because that was a major cause of death in China’s southern provinces. Tu was initially sent to Hainan, where she studied patients who had been infected with the disease. The focus of research was sweet wormwood, a traditional medicine. In 1972, she and her colleagues obtained a pure substance based on wormwood and named it qinghaosu, or artemisinin in English. This substance has now saved millions of lives, especially in the developing world.

Tu was bestowed the Medal of the Republic, the highest honorary medal of the People’s Republic of China, in September 2019.

For her work, Tu received the 2011 Lasker Award in clinical medicine and the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura. Tu is the first Chinese Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine and the first female citizen of the People’s Republic of China to receive a Nobel Prize in any category. She is also the first Chinese person to receive the Lasker Award. Tu was born, educated and carried out her research exclusively in China.