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Roey Tagansky on Tu Youyou and the Rediscovery That Defeated Malaria

Roey Tagansky/LinkedIn

Jan 24, 2026, 15:43

Roey Tagansky on Tu Youyou and the Rediscovery That Defeated Malaria

Roey Tagansky, Co-Founder of Tagansky Biotech, shared on LinkedIn:

”In the late 1960s, scientist Tu Youyou was tasked with finding a cure for malaria, a disease that was becoming resistant to standard drugs.

After testing hundreds of extracts with little success, she turned to traditional Chinese medical texts for clues.

In a 1,600-year-old book titled The Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies by Ge Hong, she found a specific instruction regarding sweet wormwood: “A handful of qinghao immersed with two liters of water, wring out the juice and drink it all.”

This sentence sparked a massive realization.

Tu understood that modern scientists, who were boiling the herbs to extract the medicine, were actually destroying the active ingredient with heat.

She switched to a cold extraction method using ether, and the results were immediate and potent.

To ensure the drug was safe before clinical trials, she bravely volunteered to be the first human test subject.

Her discovery of artemisinin has since saved tens of millions of lives worldwide and earned her the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015.”

Roey Tagansky on Tu Youyou and the Rediscovery That Defeated Malaria