Youyou Tu

China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences

Youyou Tu is a Chinese pharmaceutical chemist and researcher at the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences in Beijing. She was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with William Campbell and Satoshi Omura, for her discoveries concerning novel therapies against malaria. Tu's Nobel work spanned more than four decades of patient research into traditional Chinese medicine as a source of new drugs for malaria, which was killing hundreds of thousands of people annually and for which resistance to existing drugs such as chloroquine was spreading rapidly. Drawing on ancient Chinese medical texts—specifically a 4th-century recipe by Ge Hong describing the use of Artemisia annua (sweet wormwood) steeped in cold water—Tu and her team identified artemisinin (qinghaosu) as the active antimalarial compound in 1972. Crucially, she recognized that standard high-temperature extraction methods destroyed the activity and switched to a low-temperature ether extraction, preserving the thermally sensitive peroxide bridge essential for artemisinin's antimalarial activity. Artemisinin and its derivatives remain the frontline treatment for Plasmodium falciparum malaria worldwide, and artemisinin combination therapies (ACTs) recommended by the WHO have saved millions of lives. Tu is the first Chinese Nobel laureate in natural sciences and the first person to receive both China's highest science award and a Nobel Prize. Her work exemplifies the value of systematically mining traditional medicine knowledge with modern scientific rigor.