The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet announced the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2015 on Oct. 6.
The winners include; William C. Campbell, formerly of New Jersey, and Satoshi Omura of Japan, and Tu Youyou of China.The three scientists used modern laboratory techniques to discover anti-parasitic drugs secreted in herbs and soil.
The 84-year-old pharmacologist Youyou was awarded half of the esteemed prize for her discovery of artemisinin. 80-year-old Ōmura, an expert in soil microbes at Kitasato University, and Campbell, an Irish-born parasitologist at Drew University in New Jersey, share the other half of the $960,000 prize, for the discovery of avermectin, a treatment for roundworm parasites.
Omura discovered avermectin from the bacterium Streptomyces avermitilis. Ivermectin was developed from soil bacteria. Campbell purified avermectin from cultures obtained from Omura and his research work led to the discovery of ivermectin, a derivative of greater potency and lower toxicity. Ivermectin was introduced in 1981.
Ivermectin is a broad-spectrum antiparasitic drug in the avermectin family.It is mainly used in humans in the treatment of onchocerciasis (river blindness), but is also effective against other worm infestations (such as strongyloidiasis, ascariasis, trichuriasis, filariasis and enterobiasis), and some epidermal parasitic skin diseases, including scabies.
Youyou discovered natural-based remedy against parasites that cause malaria called Arteminisin under Project 523. The drug artemisinin - the best defense against the mosquito-borne disease, which kills 450,000 people each year.It is isolated from the plant Artemisia annua, sweet wormwood, an herb employed in Chinese traditional medicine.
Its semi-synthetic derivatives are a group of drugs that possess the fastest action of all current drugs against Plasmodium falciparum malaria. Treatments containing an artemisinin derivative (artemisinin-combination therapies, ACTs) are now standard treatment worldwide for P. falciparum malaria.
Project 523 is a code name for the secret military project of the Chinese Government during the Vietnam War. It included the transformation of Artemisinin from traditional Chinese medicine to mainstream anti-malaria chemotherapy.
The project was set up in 1967 by Chairman Mao Zedong, to help Communist troops fighting in the mosquito-ridden jungles of Vietnam, where they were losing more soldiers to malaria than bullets. CNN reported.
Among the scientists of the project, Youyou of the Qinghaosu Research Center, Institute of Chinese Materia Medica, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, received both the 2011 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award and 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her role in the discovery of artemisinin.
"We needed a totally new structured antimalarial to deal with the drug resistance. I accepted the task," said Youyou in an interview with Lasker Foundation in 2011.