Artemisinin

It was Tu Youyou, a Chinese researcher, who discovered that the molecule artemisinin from the Artemisia annua plant, well known in traditional medicine, was potentially efficient against malaria. This turned out to be one of the major discoveries in medicine in the 20th century, so Tu Youyou received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015 for her work.

Over the last decade, hundreds of scientific studies have been carried out to elucidate the enormous therapeutic potential of the molecule artemisinin and its derivatives, to treat not only malaria but many other very different diseases including cancer, autoimmune and inflammatory diseases (multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis), dermatological (seborrheic dermatitis) and rare diseases (Lyme disease and schistosomiasis).