Chinese medical scientist Tu Youyou, who is presently in Stockholm, Sweden, for the 2015 Nobel Prize Award Ceremonies, emphasized that joint efforts are "urgently needed" in the world's fight against malaria.
Speaking at a press conference at the Karolinska Institute, the 84-year-old pharmaceutical chemist and China's first recipient of the Nobel Prize in Medicine said that global research under the World Health Organization framework should focus on delaying "the process of artemisinin resistance," the Xinhua News Agency reported.
"Malaria is a pandemic that can go easily out of control, especially in low income regions such as Africa," Tu said. "It's hard to develop a new drug in the next decade, during which it would be too late, if malaria became widespread."
She discussed the importance of traditional Chinese medicine as a bountiful resource in medical research, citing the thousands of years of knowledge poured into the practice. She added that traditional Chinese medicine, coupled with modern technology, has great potential "in searching for new drugs."
While previously dismissed as a pseudoscience, traditional Chinese medicine is gaining wider acceptance outside Chinese borders and is being practiced by more people in the Netherlands, Canada and Britain, Xinhua said in another report.
Tu won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering a novel therapy against malaria. Her accomplishment is viewed by many as the emergence of China's impact on global research.
China's research productivity has increased 400 percent from 2004 to 2014, whereas overall global output has increased only by 70 percent, according to Huffington Post.