由拉斯克基金会公布的拉斯克奖被普遍认为是美国最具影响力的医学大奖。它的每个奖项设25万美元奖金。
除了阿瑟·霍里奇和弗朗兹一乌尔里克·哈特尔因为关于蛋白折叠的研究赢得基础医学研究奖外，该基金会还把大奖授予了一名81岁的中国科学家，奖励她将一种草药变成了世界广泛使用的抗疟疾药物。
这位科学家就是屠呦呦，这种抗疟疾药物就是数十年前发现的青蒿素。
屠及其同事在上世纪60年代文化大革命时期开始研究工作。当时中国政府启动了一个项目，以寻找治疗疟疾的新药。由于疟原虫出现抗药性，原先治疗疟疾的氯奎逐渐失效。
他们研究了中国古代医疗文献，并从200种植物中提取了380种提取物。
屠和她的团队发现了从青蒿中提取一种有效物质的方法。他们剔除了其中的有毒成分，并证明这种提取物能消除动物身上的疟原虫。事实证明，后来制成的青蒿素可以治疗人类所患疟疾。
今天青蒿素及其衍生物通常辅以其他疗法来抗击疟疾。世界卫生组织评论说，这种组合疗法是消灭这种疾病的“首要疗法”。
拉斯克基金会说：“显然，屠的洞见拯救了干百万生命——尤其发展中国家人民的生命，并将在今后抗击这种致命疾病的斗争中继续造福人类。”
今年的拉斯克奖将于9月23日在纽约举行颁奖仪式。
生物探索推荐英文文章阅读：
The Lasker Awards, announced on Monday by the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation, carry a $250,000 prize per category and are widely considered the nation’s most prestigious medical awards.
Besides Dr. Arthur L. Horwich and Dr. Franz-Ulrich Hartl, who won the award for basic medical research for their discoveries about protein folding, the foundation is honoring an 81-year-old Chinese scientist for her work on turning an herbal medicine into a widely used antimalarial drug.
The scientist is Dr. Tu Youyou, and the antimalarial drug is artemisinin, which was discovered decades ago.
Dr. Tu and her colleagues began their work in the 1960s, during the Cultural Revolution, when the Chinese government began a project to find a new malaria drug that could replace the standard treatment, chloroquine, which was losing effectiveness as malaria parasites developed resistance.
They scoured the literature on ancient Chinese remedies and collected 380 extracts from 200 herbs that offered promise. One of the plants they studied was sweet wormwood, or Artemisia annua, which was used by Chinese herbalists centuries ago to treat fever.
Dr. Tu and her team discovered a way to extract an active substance from the plant, removed a toxic portion of it, and demonstrated that it wiped out the malaria-causing parasite in animals. The resulting drug, artemisinin, was later shown to cure malaria in humans.
Today, artemisinin and its derivatives are typically coupled with other treatments to combat malaria, and the World Health Organization recommends this combination therapy as the “first-line treatment” against the disease.
“It is clear that Tu’s insight and vision have saved millions of lives, particularly in the developing world, and continues to yield long-term medical benefits in the ongoing fight against this deadly disease,” the foundation said.
This year’s Lasker Public Service Award went to the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health “for creating a research hospital where doctors develop innovative therapies and explore new ways to diagnose, treat and prevent a wide variety of diseases.”
That award is being renamed this year in honor of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, who received it in 2009. The prizes are to be given at a ceremony in New York on Sept. 23.
