One of the oldest and deadliest diseases, malaria caused more than 627,000 deaths in 2020. A new treatment based on a drug initially developed to fight cancer has shown considerable promise.
Tu Youyou shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015.
Claudio Bresciani/AFP via Getty Images
The usefulness of a drug is typically measured by its active ingredient. But traditional Chinese medicine shows that there’s more to healing than using the right chemical.
Farmers beat the stalks of sweet wormwood trees to extract the leaves during harvesting in rural China, The plant contains artemisinin, the drug which won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
epa/Michael Reynolds
The drug partly responsible for more than halving the rate of malaria over the last 30 years and which won this year’s Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine has a long history of use.