Professor Sir Nick White, who has died of cancer aged 74, was an expert on tropical diseases and played a leading role in transforming treatments for malaria, saving millions of lives.
In 1981 he read a paper published in 1979 in the Chinese Medical Journal describing how “Qinghaosu”, a drug derived from sweet wormwood and used in traditional herbal medicine, was curing malaria with no side-effects.
At the time malaria was resurgent as the Plasmodium parasites which cause the disease were becoming increasingly resistant to the drugs used to treat it. The idea that a traditional Chinese herbal medicine might offer the solution was greeted with scepticism by most global health experts, but White thought it was worth further examination.
He travelled to China and brought a sample of Qinghaosu, known in English as artemisinin, back to his lab at the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU) in Thailand, a Wellcome Trust-funded partnership between Mahidol University in Bangkok and Oxford University’s Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health.
In early studies White and colleagues found that artemisinin, though effective, metabolised into the body so quickly that malaria sufferers needed seven doses a day. White thought the answer might be to combine it with another drug that was slower-acting but longer-lasting.
Clinical trials undertaken in Asia and Africa proved the effectiveness of artemisinin combination therapy, which was found to cure 98 per cent of uncomplicated cases, while reducing infection rates.