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By Pascale Maria
How would you feel if I told you that the one person who discovered a vaccine for malaria was a woman? It feels good, I know, well that’s what Youyou Tu did. She discovered the compound named artemisinin, a compound that can protect people from the deadly disease.
But… ”What exactly is malaria?” you might ask yourself.
Malaria is an infection caused by the plasmodium species (single cell parasites spread by mosquitoes). Malaria comes from ,, Mal aria’’ and it basically means ,,bad air”, because it had existed way before people could figure out how it spreads and works. It starts when a plasmodium infected mosquito bites a human (beware, not every mosquito has the capability to carry the plasmodium parasite, calm down). When an infected mosquito bites a person it injects, through its saliva, sporozoites into the bloodstream. The parasites go and ,,hide’’ in the liver cell membrane, a place where it is harder for the immune cells to identify the parasite. As long as the parasites stay in the liver, the person infected won’t have any symptoms, but that’s where the interesting part starts. The plasmodium replicates so much that it bursts out into the bloodstream and starts to affect the red blood cells, altering the way they look, function and affect the hemoglobin in the blood. When a red blood cell is affected by a parasite the immune system will discover it because of the parasitic proteins exported outside of the cell. It does not work like that with malaria because the plasmodium determines the external proteins to constantly change, confusing the immune system. That is why people struggled to find a cure. At the end, the red blood cell bursts open releasing toxins affecting the oxygen exchange in the body and leading to death.
Malaria affects mostly children under five years old, pregnant women, people with other health conditions (like HIV) and people who had never interacted with the parasite before. The symptoms can be: high fever, chills, sweating, headaches, diarrhea, vomiting, kidney failure and seizures.
There are over 100 types of species of plasmodium but only five cause malaria.
-Plasmodium falciforum
-Plasmodium vivax
-Plasmodium malariae
-Plasmodium knowlesi
Fun Fact:
People with sickle cell anemia cannot get malaria! It’s because plasmodium vivax needs a special type of receptor named the duffy antigen to enter the cell. Persons with sickle cell anemia do not possess this receptor making it impossible for the plasmodium to penetrate the red blood cell. I guess you lose some, you win some, right?
Now that we know what disease we are speaking about, let’s talk more about Youyou Tu.
Youyou Tu was born on December 30th 1930 and at 16 she had to take a two-year break from high school because she was sick of tuberculosis. She decided to find cures for diseases like the one she had. She studied pharmacology at Beijing Medical College and graduated in 1955 at 24 years old. After that, she continued her academic journey working at the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine and between 1959 and 1962 she took a full time course on Traditional Chinese Medicine.
It all started with the Vietnam war where soldiers were extremely sick because of malaria and the main agent in the disease became immune to the chloroquine- the main substance in the treatment they were using. Here appears Project 523 (military project from 1967 that had as a goal to find a cure for malaria) where Youyou Tu was the main researcher. The team traveled to Hainan Island where a malaria outbreak had happened so that they could study it better. They tested 240.000 compounds from Ancient Chinese Medical texts on mice that had malaria and nothing worked… so what was there to do?
Youyou Tu looked once again over the medical texts and discovered a plant named qinghao, or sweet wormwood, that they had already tested, but she realized they did not follow the instructions properly. The qinghao needed to be boiled first before being used as a drug. After following the recipe, she eventually got what she was looking for. She tested the drug on herself and her other colleagues to make sure it was safe and then she tested it on 21 patients and fortunately all got cured.
The vaccine generates immune responses against the surface proteins and apical membrane antigen.
She was called the ,, three NOes winner’’. A woman who won a Nobel with no Phd, no medical degree and no work done overseas.
She faced unkind remarks, others attacked her saying that her colleagues already had their eyes on the compound in qinghao before she did, trying to bring down her achievements. However, Youyou Tu still remains an important figure in medicine and a true role model for girls to look up to! Girls can!
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