The Story of Tu Youyou: The Woman Who Finds Malaria Herbal Medicine Through A Secret Project

For observers of traditional medicine techniques, Tu Youyou must be a familiar name. She is a traditional medicine expert from China who discovered the herbal medicine for malaria, artemisinin. The herb was the most effective for treating malaria to date.

Source: https://www.pnas.org

The story of Tu Youyou’s journey to finding artemisinin is quite winding. She was born in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, China, December 30, 1930. Tu received higher education in pharmacy from Beijing Medical College and graduated in 1955.

Tu Youyou further studied traditional Chinese medicine after joining the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine (now the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences). Between 1959 and 1962, Tu received full training in the use of traditional Chinese medicine.

Source: https://pandaily.com/

The training was deliberately aimed at researchers who are familiar with the western system of medicine. The goal is to be able to collaborate traditional Chinese medicine with the existing more modern forms and science.

On the other hand, the Chinese government is on a secret mission to find a cure for malaria. This was because chloroquine, which was a common malaria drug at that time, was no longer able to kill the plasmodium parasite that causes malaria.

The project was named 523 because it was inaugurated on May 23, 1967. Two years running, Project 523 contacted the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine to look for a cure for malaria from a traditional medicine point of view. It was at this moment that Tu Youyou was involved in project 523.

Source: https://inf.news/

The secret mission led Tu and his team to travel to the island of Hainan in search of traditional medicines that have been believed to cure malaria for generations. Tu and his team also looked for other malaria herbal remedies from ancient manuscripts of traditional Chinese medicine. Any herbs that can reduce fever will be investigated by Tu and his team.

More than 2000 herbal recipes and approximately 200 types of herbs were researched by Tu. Then the herbs are extracted so that pure ingredients capable of curing malaria can be found. A few glimmers of success emerged when artemisia leaves were able to provide a fairly effective effect in eradicating plasmodium.

However, the findings are not stable, sometimes even the extract of the same leaf does not have the effect of curing malaria at all. Tu again referred to various ancient text sources on traditional Chinese medicine.

She examined various references related to diseases that have symptoms similar to malaria. Still quoted from the article tirto.id, Tu Youyou then referred to the prescription of the healer Ge Hong, in the  Resep Darurat Rahasia (Secret Emergency Prescription) book, written in 4BC.

The book explains that artemisia leaves are only soaked and squeezed before drinking. Therefore Tu realized that too high a temperature would damage the required antimalarial extract. Finally in 1971, after changing the extraction technique, Tu and his team managed to find a malaria herbal medicine that was 100% effective at killing the plasmodium parasite. The drug is known as artemisinin or qinghaosu, which means artemisia leaf extract.

Due to the political conditions at the time, Tu could not publish the findings internationally. It was not until the early 1980s that Tu had the opportunity to present his findings to an international audience. However, the WHO only officially recommended the use of artemisinin for malaria drugs in the early 2000s.

Tu Youyou’s discovery earned her the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine category in 2015. The official website nobelprize.org writes that thanks to the discovery of the malaria herbal medicine artemisinin, millions of human lives could be saved.