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.”
Stay updated with Hemostasis Today.
-
Jun 29, 2026, 15:50Sweta Agrawal: Expanding Care for PNH Patients in Nepal
-
Jun 29, 2026, 15:17Heghine Khachatryan: Hemostasis at the Crossroads of Thrombosis and Bleeding
-
Jun 29, 2026, 15:07Tomaz Crochemore: From Bleeding to Thrombosis – The Era of Precision Hemostatic Medicine Has Arrived
-
Jun 29, 2026, 14:51Pete Stibbs: Building a Successful Venous Thrombectomy Practice
-
Jun 29, 2026, 14:30Bruno Pougault: Pregnancy and Thrombosis – Balancing Evolutionary Protection Against Clinical Risk
-
Jun 29, 2026, 13:32Omid Seidizadeh: The Full VWD Session from EHA 2026 Is Now Available to Watch
-
Jun 29, 2026, 13:22Cheryl Carcel: Make The Stroke Research More Inclusive for Women, Take The Survey
-
Jun 29, 2026, 13:18Bianca Rocca: New Expert Opinion On the Evolving Debate on Factor XI as a Therapeutic Target
-
Jun 29, 2026, 13:06Francisco Chacón-Lozsán: Intermittent Hemodialysis in the ICU Should not be Monitored Only by ‘Session Completed’