Chinese Nobel Laureate Tu Youyou announced on June 17 that her team has come up with solutions to the problem of artemisinin resistance, providing new evidence that artemisinin is still the best weapon against malaria, the world's No.1 insect-borne disease.

As the winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for the discovery of artemisinin, Tu said that drug resistance has remained a big challenge to fight malaria.

Tu's team has discovered that partial artemisinin resistance is actually a delay in the clearance of malaria parasites from the bloodstream following treatment with combination therapy. A paper on the study was published in the April issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Artemisinin substances are extracted from the plant Artemisia apiacea Hance, or Qinghao in Chinese, which has been used in China for more than 2,000 years for treating infectious diseases.

Tu has worked with the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences since 1955, winning China's top science award in 2017.