The Nobel Prize for medicine has been jointly
awarded this year to three scientists for their work on parasitic diseases. Half
of the award goes to Ireland's William Campbell and Japan's Satoshi Omura, who
discovered a new drug to treat infections caused by roundworm parasites. The
other half goes to China's Tu Youyou, who used traditional herbal medicine to
find a new kind of anti-malaria agent.
Fighting against Malaria:
Malaria is a mosquito-borne disease caused by parasites that
invade red blood cells. It can cause fever and, in some cases, brain damage and
death. More than 450,000 people die every year from malaria. Many of them are
children. And roughly half of the world's population -- 3.4 billion people --
are at risk of contracting malaria.
The disease was traditionally treated by chloroquine or
quinine, but by the late 1960s, efforts to eradicate malaria had failed and the
disease was on the rise.
Therefore, Youyou Tu turned to traditional herbal medicine
to try to tackle the disease. Using the plant Artemisia annua, she discovered a
purification procedure that rendered an active agent called Artemisinin.
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| Tu Youyou |
"Artemisinin represents a new class of antimalarial
agents that rapidly kill the Malaria parasites at an early stage of their
development, which explains its unprecedented potency in the treatment of
severe Malaria.
How Tu Youyou worked for achieving this Miracle
In the turmoil of China's Cultural Revolution, scientist Tu
Youyou joined a covert mission to find a cure for malaria. "Project
523," was set up in 1967 by Chairman Mao Zedong, who wanted to help
Communist troops fighting in the mosquito-ridden jungles of Vietnam, where they
were losing more soldiers to malaria than bullets. "We needed a totally
new structured antimalarial to deal with the drug resistance. I accepted the
task," Tu recalled in 2011.
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| China's Youyou Tu and an illustration describing her work are displayed on a screen during a press conference of the Nobel Committee to announce the winners of the 2015 Nobel Medicine Prize on October 5, 2015. |
She scoured ancient texts and folk manuals and traveled to remote parts of the country for clues, ultimately collecting 2,000 potential remedies. She whittled these down to 380 and tested each one on mice. One of the compounds tested reduced the number of malaria parasites in the rodents' blood. Derived from sweet wormwood, its use as a treatment for malaria was first recorded in 1600 years ago in China, when a manual recommended drinking juice extracted from the plant.
Her discovery resulted in the drug artemisinin --
humankind's best defense against the mosquito-borne disease, which kills
450,000 people each year.
On Monday, she was one of a trio of scientists awarded the
Nobel Prize for medicine.
Rao Yi, a Chinese neurobiologist, says it's a miracle the
compound was discovered at all, given that most of China's universities and
research institutes were shut down as red guards ran riot across the country
during the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 and continued for more than
a decade.
Many scientists, especially those with Western training,
were persecuted, he co-wrote in an academic paper published in Science China. As
a result, it wasn't until 1977 the first academic paper on artemisinin was
published. The first English-language research wasn't published until 1982.
Louis A. Miller, at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy
and Infectious Diseases, said that many scientists would have given up after
early tests showed mixed results. Tu perfected her extraction techniques after
realizing that high temperatures were killing the active ingredient.
She also volunteered to be the new compound's first human
test subject.
"Many people... would have dropped and looked for other
things but she pereserved until she had something that worked 100%,"
Miller told the Lasker Foundation, which awarded Tu America's highest medical
accolade in 2011 -- the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award.
Since 2000, more than 1 billion artemisinin-based treatment
courses have been administered to malaria patients, according to the World
Health Organization, contributing to the successful control of Malaria in
several endemic countries
Today, artemisinin compounds form the backbone of malaria
treatment and are used in combination therapy to reduce the risk of the
development of resistance. Although its success means that there's a risk of
resistance problems resurfacing again.
Campbell and Omura discovered a
new drug, Avermectin, the derivatives of which "have radically lowered the
incidence of River Blindness and Lymphatic Filariasis.
River blindness, or onchocerciasis, can cause
vision impairment or blindness, nodules under the skin or debilitating itching.
Lymphatic filariasis, commonly
known as elephantiasis, is a painful and extremely disfiguring disease. Today
the Avermectin-derivative Ivermectin is used in all parts of the world that are
plagued by parasitic diseases.
The importance of Ivermectin for
improving the health and wellbeing of millions of individuals with River
Blindness and Lymphatic Filariasis, primarily in the poorest regions of the
world, is immeasurable. Treatment is so successful that these diseases are on
the verge of eradication.
Source:CNN,
See more at: Nature
See more at: Nature