In honor of Professor Youyou Tu on the occasion of her 90th birthday
Authors: Chengchao Xu, Jigang Wang
Journal: Medicinal Research Reviews (2021)

This issue of Medicinal Research Reviews is dedicated to Professor Youyou Tu, the director of Artemisinin Research Centre, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, on the occasion of her 90th birthday. Professor Tu received her bachelor's degree from Beijing Medical College in 1955. After graduating, Professor Tu joined the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine and worked on antimalaria drug development for more than six decades. The importance of artemisinin, the brainchild of Professor Tu, goes without saying. A lesser-known fact about the history of this drug is that, to accelerate the process of the clinical trial of artemisinin and save more patients, Professor Tu first tested the safety of the drug on herself. More than 40 years after its discovery, artemisinin and its derivatives are still the most important weapons of the global community for malaria control and elimination. Professor Tu's seminal work has been recognized by numerous national and international prizes, including the National Science Congress Prize, China (1978); the National Inventor's Prize, China (1979); the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award (2011); the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize (2015); the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (2015); the Highest Science and Technology Award, China (2016); and the Medal of the Republic, China (2019). We have the privilege to work with Professor Tu and have ongoing discussions on “artemisinin resistance,” a topic she has followed and carefully thought about for the last ten years. Both of us have benefited tremendously from her unconditional support, mainly her inspiration that continuous efforts can bring real changes to both science and daily life. Professor Tu has been a great mentor for the people who have worked with her and a role model for the younger generation of scientists. To celebrate Professor Tu's 90th birthday, we—as her mentees—organized this special issue as a tribute to her discovery of artemisinin that continues to save countless lives in the world and to her inspiration of upcoming generations of scientists. In this special issue, we focused on topics that are related to artemisinin and drug discovery from medicinal plants. Among them, five articles are directly related to artemisinin, highlighting the rapid development and broad impact of artemisinin research. Behrens et al. discussed the role of endocytosis in artemisinin resistance. On the repurposing of artemisinin, Meng et al. provided a comprehensive overview, and Efferth and Oesch focused on the immunosuppressive activity of artemisinin-related compounds. For novel drug development, Çapcı et al. reviewed the recent progress on artemisinin-derived dimers, and Woodley et al. focused on the artemisinin-inspired endoperoxide drugs. For other natural products, Zhang et al.,11 These four articles for the Special Issue were published before this collection was released, and can be found in their respective issues or online. Volume 41, Issue 3. Tripterygium wilfordii: An inspiring resource for rheumatoid arthritis treatment. Yanqiong Zhang, Xia Mao, Weijie Li, Wenjia Chen, Xiaoyue Wang, Zhaochen Ma, Na Lin. https://doi.org/10.1002/med.21762. The pleiotropic role of transcription factor STAT3 in oncogenesis and its targeting through natural products for cancer prevention and therapy. Manoj Garg, Muthu K. Shanmugam, Vipul Bhardwaj, Akul Goel, Rajat Gupta, Arundhiti Sharma, Prakash Baligar, Alan Prem Kumar, Boon Cher Goh, Lingzhi Wang, Gautam Sethi. https://doi.org/10.1002/med.21761. Protein corona formed in the gastrointestinal tract and its impacts on oral delivery of nanoparticles. Tianxu Zhang, Guanyin Zhu, Boyao Lu, Zhiyong Qian, Qiang Peng. https://doi.org/10.1002/med.21767. Cardiac efficacy and toxicity of aconitine: A new frontier for the ancient poison. Wei Zhou, Hong Liu, Li-Zhen Qiu, Lan-Xin Yue, Guang-Jie Zhang, Hui-Fang Deng, Yu-Hao Ni, Yue Gao. https://doi.org/10.1002/med.21777 Song et al.,1 and Zhou et al.1 discussed how to exploit the rich resources from different medicinal plants, while Garg et al.1 and Raj et al. focused on targeting specific pathways using natural products. For the newly emerging areas, Sun et al. reviewed the novel label-free methodologies that can be applied to investigate the mechanism of action of natural products, and Hu et al. and Zhang et al. discussed using biosynthetic approaches to exploit medicinal plants. Last but not least, Fu et al. reviewed “The Yin and Yang of traditional Chinese and Western medicine.” Professor Tu has devoted her entire career to antimalaria drug discovery and she believes that traditional medicine could provide inspirations and solutions to many diseases that do not currently have effective cures. With the advent of new technologies and analytical instruments, we are now in a much better position to mine the rich resources of medicinal plants and traditional medicine. We believe these advances mean another artemisinin equivalent drug derived from natural products is coming soon.