Scientists in China have been working for a decade to combat the increasing resistance to the landmark anti-malaria drug artemisinin.
Dr. Changsheng Deng, manager of the Department of Science and Technology at Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, said that a special project has been created to focus on resistance to artemisinin and use it to help eliminate the disease over the next decade.
"Our strategy seeks to eliminate blood-borne malaria parasites from the human body," Deng told African journalists at a press conference at Guangzhou University.
Malaria is a highly infectious disease caused by parasites that are transmitted to people through a bite from a female mosquito.
In 2015, more than 200 million people were infected with malaria, leading to 438,000 deaths worldwide, most of them children in Africa.
Artemisinin was discovered as a treatment for malaria by Chinese chemist Youyou Tu, who was awarded the Nobel Prize two years ago for her work.
Deng hopes that the malaria parasites can be eradicated through "mass drug administration with artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs)."
English Wang, president of Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, said that the drug could continue to help fight malaria in Africa and other parts of the world.
The AFP News Agency reported in March that for the first time in Africa, researchers have detected a malaria parasite that was partially resistant to artemisinin.
The drug-resistant parasites were detected from a Chinese national who had traveled from Equatorial Guinea to China.
In a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the spread of artemisinin-resistant malaria parasites in Africa would be a major setback in the fight against malaria.
"ACT (artemisinin-based combination therapy) is the only effective and widely used antimalarial treatment at the moment," the study said.
"Therefore, it is very important to regularly monitor artemisinin resistance on a worldwide scale."
The discovery also means that Africa now joins Southeast Asia in hosting such drug-resistant forms of the mosquito-borne disease, according to the AFP.
In Southeast Asia, strains of the malaria-carrying agent have exhibited signs of partial resistance to artemisinin.
The main driver of the resistance to artemisinin in Asia was due to a mutation in a gene called Kelch 13, whose origin was traced back to Africa, according to the study from the New England Journal of Medicine.