This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded to three researchers from Japan, Ireland, and China who identified treatments for major tropical diseases.
The discoverers of drugs to treat parasitic diseases that predominantly affect people in the developing world have won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Satoshi Omura, from Kitasato University in Tokyo, Japan, and Irish-born William Campbell, from Drew University in Madison, NJ, USA, shared half of the prize for their work on avermectin and its derivatives, a drug that has proven highly effective against river blindness, lymphatic filariasis, and several other parasitic infections. The other half of the prize went to Youyou Tu, from the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Beijing, for her discovery of artemisinin, which forms the backbone of the most effective current treatment for malaria. Read more in The Lancet.