Tu Youyou

Tu Youyou was born on December 30th, 1930, Ningho, Zhejiang province, China. She is a Chinese scientist and phytochemist known for her isolation and study of antimalarial substance, qinghaosu, later known as artemisinin, one of the world's most effective malaria-fighting drugs.

Her family stressed education for her and her four brothers, however she had to take a two-year break from studying at 16, because she had contracted tuberculosis. Once she returned to school, she knew exactly what she wanted to study: medicine. She wanted to find cures for diseases like the one that had afflicted her.
   
Tu studied at the department of pharmaceutics of Beijing Medical College.
Learning how to classify medicinal plants, extract active ingredients, and determine their chemical structures.

When she graduated in 1955 at the age of 24, Tu was chosen to join the Institute of Materia Medica at the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine (later the Chinese Academy of  Chinese Medical Sciences).

From 1959 to 1963, she participated in a full-time training course in the use of traditional Chinese medicine that was geared toward researchers with knowledge of Western medicine. The course provided a foundation for her later application of traditional Chinese medical knowledge to modern drug discovery.

In 1969, during the Vietnam War (1954-1975), Tu was appointed to lead Project 523, at the age of 39, it was a covert effort to discover treatment for malaria. The project was initiated by the Chinese government at the urging of allies in North Vietnam, where malaria had claimed the lives of numerous soldiers.

The single-celled parasite that causes malaria had become resistant to chloroquine, which was the standard malaria treatment. Chairman Mao Zedong launched Projected 523 on May 23rd, 1967, to find a cure for chloroquine-resistant malaria.

Her first order of business was to research the effects of malaria in situ. And for that, she traveled to Hainan Island in southern China; which had been experiencing a malaria outbreak of its own. It was in those rainforests that Tu witnessed first-hand the disease’s devastating toll on the human body.

Tu had to leave her one-year-old daughter with her parents and put her four-year-old in a nursery. “The work was the top priority so I was certainly willing to sacrifice my personal life,” Tu later said. (It would be three years before she saw her children again.)

Upon their return to Beijing, the team reviewed ancient medical texts to understand traditional Chinese ways of fighting  malaria. Tu and her team of researchers began by identifying plants with supposed activity against malaria on the basis of information from folk medicine and remedies described in ancient Chinese medical texts. Her team identified around 640 plants and more than 2,000 remedies with potential antimalarial activity and subsequently tested 380 extracts from about 200 of the plant species for their ability to rid malaria-causing Plasmodium parasites from the blood of infected mice.

Finally, the team found a reference to sweet wormwood, which had been used in China around 400 AD to treat “intermittent fevers,” a symptom of malaria.

In 1971, Tu’s team isolated one active compound in wormwood that seems to battle malaria-friendly parasites. They tested extracts of the compound but nothing worked. So, Tu returned once more to the ancient test, wondering whether the active ingredient in woodworm was being damaged when they boiled the wormwood to prepare the solvent, and so she tried another preparation, this time with an ether-based solvent.

Since it boils at a lower temperature, the wormwood wasn’t damaged; and when she tested it on mice and monkeys, it had a 100% success rate.

Tu and two colleagues tested the substance on themselves before testing them on 21 patients in Hainan Province. All 21 patients recovered.

The following year, Tu’s team distilled the compound's active ingredient, artemisinin, and shared their findings. While she was initially prevented from publishing her team’s findings, because of restrictions on the publication of scientific information that were in place in China at the time.

Her work was not published in English until 1979, shortly after in 1981, the WHO, World Bank, and UN each invited her to present her findings on the global stage.

It took two decades, but finally the WHO recommended artemisinin combination therapy as the first line of defense against malaria. The Lasker Foundation, which awards Tu it’s Clinical Medical Research Award in 2011, calling the discovery of artemisinin “arguably the most important pharmaceutical intervention in the last half-century.”

Tu for her part was reluctant to take credit, “I do not want fame,” she said. Deflecting praise towards her colleague from modern as well as ancient China. When she accepted the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, her lecture was entitled, “Discovery of Artemisinin: A Gift from Traditional Chinese Medicine to the World.”

But, she was still very clearly proud of her discovery stating, “Every scientist dreams of doing something that can help the world.