Yo, Chinese women scientists have won the Nobel Prize! The story behind artemisinin

　　Yo, the Nobel Prize!

　　According to the official website of the Nobel Prize, Tu Youyou, an 85-year-old Chinese female scientist, shared this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with two other American and Japanese scientists, William C. Campbell and Satoshi Mura. Tu Youyou has been engaged in the research of the combination of traditional Chinese medicine and Chinese and Western medicine for many years, and his outstanding contribution is to create new antimalarial drugs - artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin.

　　This is the first time that a Chinese scientist has won the Nobel Prize in Science for scientific research in China, the highest award won by the Chinese medical community so far, and the highest award for the achievements of traditional Chinese medicine.

　　Nobel prize winner joseph Goldstein once said, "The development of biomedicine is mainly through two different pathways, one is discovery, the other is invention. Tu Youyou said, "It is a great honor that I have taken both roads."

　　Who is Tu Youyou?

　　"Youyou deer singing, eating wild artemisia", the famous sentence in the Book of Poetry, is the source of Tu Youyou's name, and the wild grass that the deer eats is Artemisia annua. This is an arrangement in the dark, her life is destined to be associated with Artemisia annua, and the Nobel Prize that the Chinese people have been looking forward to for many years has come to be so "Chinese style". Tu Youyou, 85, is a tenured researcher and chief researcher at the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine (now the Chinese Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences) and the director of the Artemisinin Research and Development Center. As a representative figure of artemisinin research and development achievements, Tu Youyou won the Nobel Prize in the field of natural sciences in Chinese mainland and became the only woman among the Nobel Prize winners in China

　　Tu Youyou was born in December 1930 in Ningbo, Zhejiang. In 1951, Tu Youyou was admitted to the Department of Pharmacy of Beijing Medical College (now Peking University Medical College) as she wished, and the major chosen was precisely biopharmacy, which was not of interest to ordinary people at that time. She feels that the pharmacy profession is most likely to be closest to exploring the field of Traditional Chinese medicine with a long history, which is in line with her own interests and ideals. In her professional courses, she has a particular interest in phytochemistry, Materia Medica and plant taxonomy. In 1955, after graduating from university, he was assigned to the Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine (now the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine) directly under the Ministry of Health.

　　In March 1977, the first paper "A New Sesquiterpene Lactone - Artemisinin" written under the name of the "Artemisinin Structure Research Collaborative Group" was published in the "Scientific Bulletin", which attracted close attention and great attention from all over the world.

　　In October 1981, an international artemisinin conference sponsored by the World Health Organization and others was held in Beijing, and Tu Youyou, as the chief spokesperson, gave a report on "Chemical Research on Artemisinin", which aroused great interest from representatives at home and abroad. In the report, WHO officials pointed out that in theory, any new drug has a new structure and its mode of action, so as to delay the emergence of drug resistance and have a longer vitality. Obviously, Chinese artemisinin meets this requirement.

　　As a tenured researcher at the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, Tu Youyou, 85, is still engaged in research in the frontline. I have my own office and I still have projects.

　　What is Artemisinin?

　　Artemisia annua is also known in Chinese folklore as Artemisia annua and Artemisia annua, and is an annual herb of the Asteraceae family. The object referred to in the Chinese "Book of Poetry" is "Yo Yo Deer Singing, Eating Wild Artemisia" is Artemisia annua. As early as the 2nd century BC, the Chinese pre-Qin medical prescription book "Fifty-two Sick Prescriptions" has already recorded the plant Artemisia annua; In 340 BC, Ge Hong of the Eastern Jin Dynasty first described the antipyretic function of Artemisia annua in his book "Elbow Reserve Emergency Formula"; Li Shizhen's "Compendium of Materia Medica" says that it can "cure malaria cold and fever".

　　Malaria is one of the most important public health issues of global concern, widely endemic around the world, according to the World Health Organization, there are still 92 countries and regions in high and moderate epidemic, the number of cases per year is 150 million, and more than 2 million people die of malaria.

　　The most powerful human drug against malaria is derived from two plant extracts, one is the quinine extracted from the bark of the plant cinchona in the early 19th century by French scientists, and the other is the artemisinin extracted from artemisia annua in the 1970s by Chinese scientists. In 2001, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) to all countries where falciparum malaria is endemic.

　　How to find artemisinin antimalarial?

　　On October 4, 1971, a pair of eyes nervously stared at the final results of the antimalarial experiment of Artemisia annua extract sample No. 191. As the test results were revealed, the entire laboratory boiled over: the sample had a 100% inhibition rate of the malaria parasite!

　　The time goes back to May 23, 1967, when China urgently launched the "Malaria Prevention and Control Drug Research Collaboration" project, code-named "523". There were 500 scientific researchers from more than 60 units across the country, and Tu Youyou was one of them. She was placed in the TCM Collaboration Group, which mainly conducted experimental research from the perspective of TCM. Behind the project is a harsh reality: as Plasmodium falciparum becomes resistant to the older generation of antimalarial drugs represented by chloroquine, how to invent new drugs has become a thorny problem worldwide. In the face of danger, Tu Youyou was appointed as the head of the scientific research team of the "523" project Of Traditional Chinese Medicine Research Institute. The difficulty of screening thousands of Chinese herbal medicines in a short period of time under the condition of poor facilities and poor information channels is no different from finding a needle in a haystack. But these seemingly insurmountable obstacles actually inspired her fighting spirit: by flipping through the Materia Medica medical records of the past generations, visiting old Chinese medicine practitioners everywhere, and even not letting go of the letters from the masses, Tu Youyou finally sorted out a "Collection of Antimalarial Single Test Recipes" containing more than 640 kinds of herbs, including Artemisia annua, among more than 2,000 prescription drugs. However, in the initial animal experiments, the effect of Artemisia annua was not outstanding, and Tu Youyou's search was once deadlocked.

　　"Our ancestors had long experience treating malaria with Artemisia annua. Why can't we do it?" Tu Youyou looked through the ancient texts again to find the answer. A few sentences from the "Elbow Reserve Emergency" caught her attention: "Artemisia annua is grasped, stained with two liters of water, twisted to take the juice, and served." Tu Youyou immediately realized that the problem may be in the commonly used "water frying" method, because the high temperature will destroy the active ingredients in Artemisia annua, so she immediately found another way to use a low boiling point solvent for experiments.

　　In 1971, Tu Youyou et al. switched to ether with a boiling point of 60 degrees Celsius to prepare artemisia annua extract, and after more than 190 experiments, it was found that artemisia annua extract had an inhibition rate of 100% on rat malaria and monkey malaria parasite. In 1972, the results were taken seriously, and researchers extracted artemisinin, the antimalarial active ingredient, from this extract. At the "523 Project" conference held in March 1972, Tu Youyou reported on this neutral plant extract, which was named 191, in a keynote speech. Since then, research on Artemisia annua has continued to make progress. Researchers Ni Muyun and Zhong Yurong of Tu Youyou's group successfully obtained the crystallization of the extract "ArtemisinIN II", and at a symposium two years later, Tu Youyou publicly proposed the molecular formula of artemisinin II for the first time.

　　Other study groups have made similar progress. The Shandong Institute of Parasitic Diseases cooperated with the Shandong Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine to extract the effective monomer "Artemisinin" to fight malaria, and the Yunnan Provincial Institute of Materia Medica also obtained the equally effective "Artemisinin". It was not until the beginning of 1974 that the drugs extracted from Beijing, Shandong and Yunnan were initially considered to be "the same drugs".

　　Small-scale comparative studies have shown that artemisinin is more effective and has no side effects than previous internationally accepted chloroquine drugs.

　　In 1992, in view of the high cost of artemisinin and the difficulty of curing malaria, she invented dihydroartemisinin, an "upgraded version" with an antimalarial efficacy 10 times that of the former. In order to prove the efficacy of artemisinin on human malaria, Tu Youyou and others even bravely experimented on themselves first.

　　Although Tu Youyou may not have been the first to discover the antimalarial effects of Artemisia annua extract (the roots should be the ancestors of Chinese who first discovered the antimalarial effects of Artemisia annua), nor was she the first to isolate the effective antimalarial monomer, the method she established to extract artemisinin from ether is the most effective and practical.

　　Received the Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award

　　In 2011, Tu Youyou won the Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award, known as the "Nobel Prize Weather Vane", and Lucy Shapiro, a professor at Stanford University and a member of the Lasker Prize jury, delivered an award speech for Tu Youyou. "Tu Youyou's discovery has eased the pain and suffering of hundreds of millions of people and saved countless lives, especially children's lives, in more than 100 countries," she said. She also praised that the discovery of artemisinin was largely attributed to the "insight, vision and tenacious belief" of Tu Youyou and his team.

　　After the successful development of artemisinin, whether it is declaring national awards or winning foreign awards, there are some different voices. After a serious investigation by the Judges of the Lasker Prize in the United States, in the last official document, they praised Tu Youyou's discovery of artemisinin, and the key to the award was three firsts: the first to bring artemisinin into the "523" project, the first to extract artemisinin with 100% activity, and the first to apply artemisinin to the clinic and prove that it was effective.

　　In 2015, he became the new winner of the Nobel Prize

　　Tu Youyou's achievement: Isolating artemisinin from traditional Chinese medicine and applying it to malaria treatment.

　　Discovery: The pioneering discovery of artemisinin pioneered new treatments for malaria, benefiting hundreds of millions of people around the world from this "Chinese miracle drug". Artemisinin-based combinations have now become standard treatments for malaria, and the World Health Organization has included artemisinin and related agents in its essential medicines list.

　　Tu Youyou said about the award: "There is no special feeling, there are some accidents, but it is not very unexpected. ”

　　"Because this is not my honor alone, it is the honor of all scientists in China, we have studied together for decades, and it is not surprising that we can win awards."

　　Prize: $920,000 for her exclusive half. This year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine totals 8 million Swedish kronor (about $920,000), with Tu Youyou receiving half of the prize and two other scientists sharing the other half.

　　Contribution: Her discoveries have saved countless lives. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine Selection Committee notes that the discoveries of artemisinin and avermectin have fundamentally changed the treatment of parasitic diseases. About 200 million people in the world contract malaria each year, and artemisinin has reduced mortality by at least 20% and child mortality by at least 20% in the global combination of malaria treatment, saving 100,000 lives a year in Africa alone.

　　Source: China Education News Network synthesized from China Traditional Chinese Medicine News, Zhejiang Daily, Science Times, China Youth Daily, People's Daily, Beijing News, Legal Evening News, Chengdu Business Daily, etc. (Editor Zhang Chunming)