Nobel in Medicine goes to treatments for parasites

Ivermectin (left) and artemisinin both have complicated structures that synthetic chemists might have struggled to come up with.

We have successfully developed vaccines for many viruses and bacteria, and antibiotic and antiviral drugs can often be used to effectively treat infected individuals. But parasite infections pose significant challenges to traditional treatment approaches. This year's Nobel Prize in Medicine has gone to researchers who created treatments for some of humanity's biggest scourges: river blindness, as well as other nematode diseases, and malaria.

The award for development of ivermectin as a nematode treatment is shared by Satoshi Omura and William Campbell. They share the prize with Youyou Tu, who isolated artemisinin and demonstrated its effectiveness against malaria.

The challenge

Treatments for viruses and bacteria are simple in principle. It's possible to design or discover drug molecules that latch on to their proteins, keeping them from functioning normally. Since billions of years of evolution have made these organisms biologically distinct from their human hosts, these chemicals will generally not target the equivalent human proteins. Thus, while the disease-causing organism is killed, the human host is largely unaffected by these drugs. That's the principle behind antibiotics and antivirals.

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