Nobel medicine prize won for drugs from natural sources
Laureates cited for roundworm, malaria infection treatments found in soil-dwelling bacteria, sweet wormwood
By Tina Hesman Saey and Laura Sanders
Drugs that have saved the lives of millions of people around the world have earned their discoverers the 2015 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. One half of the award goes to William Campbell of Drew University in Madison, N.J., and Satoshi Ōmura of Kitasato University in Tokyo for their work on a drug called ivermectin, which combats roundworm infections. The other half goes to Youyou Tu of the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences in Beijing for her discovery of the antimalarial drug artemisinin.
“This is one of those Nobel Prizes for drugs that have truly impacted hundreds of millions of people, no exaggeration,” says Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md. “They’re incomparable in terms of numbers.”