About Institute of Chinese Materia Medica, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences

Institute of Chinese Materia Medica, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences

The Institute of Chinese Materia Medica (ICMM) is the national research institute for Chinese herbal medicine of the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, based on Nanxiao Road in Dongcheng District, Beijing. Established in 1955, it is one of the oldest national institutions in China devoted specifically to the research of Chinese materia medica, and it has served since 1983 as a World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Traditional Medicine. The institute is known worldwide as the workplace of Tu Youyou: the pharmaceutical chemist who joined the newly established academy in 1955, led its Project 523 antimalarial research group from January 1969, and directed the low-temperature ether extraction work on Artemisia annua (sweet wormwood) that yielded artemisinin — the antimalarial drug recognised with China's national scientific discovery award in 1979 and with Tu's 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Today the institute employs more than 500 people across research centres covering the whole science of herbal medicine, hosts the State Key Laboratory for Quality Ensurance and Sustainable Use of Dao-di Herbs and an Artemisinin Research Center, has developed 33 new medicines, and publishes the China Journal of Chinese Materia Medica among its four periodicals.

Foundation in 1955 and Institutional Setting

The institute was established in 1955, in the same founding wave of the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences (then known in English as the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine), when the new Chinese state created a national academy to place traditional medicine on a scientific research footing. Its own published history, A Collection of Memories for the Fifty Years (1955–2005) of the Institute of Chinese Materia Medica, marks that half-century from 1955. Among the young researchers assigned to the institute in its founding year was Tu Youyou, a 1955 graduate of the medical school of Peking University who had chosen pharmacognosy as her major; she would remain at the institute for her entire career, attending a full-time training class in traditional Chinese medicine for Western-medicine-trained doctors from 1959 to 1962. The institute's Beijing base, recorded in the scientific literature at postcode 100700, places it in Dongcheng District within the academy system whose hospitals and institutes anchor state traditional-medicine research in the capital. From the beginning its remit was the materia medica itself — the drugs of the Chinese tradition: their literature, identification, chemistry, processing, preparation, pharmacology and toxicology — studied with modern laboratory methods.

Project 523 and the Road to Artemisinin

The institute's defining chapter began with Project 523, the secret national programme for new antimalarial drugs. On 23 May 1967, representatives of China's national science commission and the military met in Beijing to launch the project, named for its start date, in response to a request from Vietnam for help against drug-resistant malaria, which was devastating soldiers and civilians alike. The project ran for thirteen years, involved hundreds of scientists, and screened tens of thousands of herbs and compounds. In January 1969 the project's directors visited the Institute of Chinese Materia Medica seeking help with the branch of the search that would work through traditional Chinese medicine, and Tu Youyou was designated the leader of the institute's 523 research group. Tu's team organised more than 640 prescriptions drawn from ancient texts and practitioners' experience, screened over 2,000 traditional recipes, and made some 380 herbal extracts for testing in mice. Progress was slow until Tu returned to a fourth-century text, Ge Hong's Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies, which described taking a handful of qinghao, soaking it in water and wringing out the juice — a preparation that used no heat. Reasoning that high-temperature extraction had been destroying the active ingredient, she redesigned the method around low-temperature ether extraction. On 4 October 1971 the team's neutral ether extract of Artemisia annua inhibited the malaria parasite in infected mice at a rate of 100 per cent, with the same result in monkeys — the breakthrough from which artemisinin, in Chinese qinghaosu, was isolated.

From Extract to Drug and World Recognition

The path from the 1971 extract to a medicine ran through the collective machinery of Project 523 and the institute's own continuing work. In July 1972 Tu and two colleagues became the first human volunteers to take the extract, establishing its safety in people before patient trials in Hainan. Clinical results were presented within the project, and a November 1978 assessment meeting formally declared the birth of artemisinin as a drug discovery. Qinghaosu was awarded the status of "national scientific discovery" by China's Committee of Science and Technology in 1979; results were published in the Chinese Medical Journal that year, and in 1981 Tu presented qinghaosu to the WHO/UNDP/World Bank scientific working group on the chemotherapy of malaria meeting in Beijing. Chinese new-drug certificates were issued for qinghaosu and for derivatives developed by Tu's team, and in 1986 artemisinin was certified as a new drug by the Ministry of Health; in 1999 it joined the WHO essential medicines framework, and from 2000 the WHO made artemisinin-based combination therapy its first-line recommendation for malaria worldwide. The discovery is estimated to have treated more than 200 million malaria sufferers. Recognition of Tu's leading role came late but completely: the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award in 2011, the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015 — the first Nobel Prize in science for research conducted in China — the National Supreme Science and Technology Prize of China in 2016, designation as a Pioneer of Reform in 2018, and the Medal of the Republic in 2019. The institute now hosts an Artemisinin Research Center, and a research studio bearing Tu's name was opened at the institute on her ninetieth birthday, 30 December 2020.

Research Structure and Centres

Through seventy years of research practice, the institute has built a team of more than 500 employees whose work covers the literature, identification, chemistry, chemical analysis, processing, preparation, pharmacology, toxicology and research and development of Chinese materia medica. Its official introduction lists research centres for Property Theory, Herbalism, Pharmacognosy, Processing, Pharmaceutical Forms, Chemistry, Analytical Chemistry, Pharmacology, Pharmacokinetics, Biomechanopharmacology, Safety Evaluation (conducted to GLP standards), Toxicology, R&D, Biotechnology, Digital Intelligence, Holistic Integrated Study, and Medicinal Products for Nebulization. Two affiliated centres anchor its resource and flagship-drug work: the Resources Center for Chinese Materia Medica (the National Resource Center for Chinese Materia Medica) and the Artemisinin Research Center. Affiliated to the institute is the State Key Laboratory for Quality Ensurance and Sustainable Use of Dao-di Herbs — the geo-authentic medicinal materials prized by region of origin in the Chinese tradition — together with the National Engineering Laboratory of Quality Control Technology of Chinese Materia Medica, a Beijing municipal key laboratory, two key research departments, twelve high-quality and key research subjects, and five key laboratories designated by the National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Its platform system is organised in three layers: theory study of Chinese materia medica, covering property theory and the principles of processing and combination; key technology for industrial application, attacking the bottlenecks of identification and quality control, processing, pharmaceutical engineering and resource conservation; and key technology for innovative medicine development, covering data mining, activity screening, efficacy evaluation, compound isolation and analysis, pharmaceutical forms, metabolism, toxicity and safety evaluation.

New Medicines and Research Output

The institute reports 522 ongoing research projects at the time of its current official introduction, drawn from the National Natural Science Foundation, national science and technology support programmes, the National Key New Drug Development Program and the National Key R&D Plan. Since its foundation it has received 381 academic prizes, including 28 national prizes; it has developed 33 new medicines, and its researchers have published more than 7,113 research papers and 322 books. In the most recent five-year period described in its introduction, the institute published more than 1,191 papers in leading international journals including The Lancet, Nature Medicine, Nature Communications, The New England Journal of Medicine and Molecular Plant. New-drug work continues from the artemisinin lineage and beyond: dihydroartemisinin tablets descend directly from the qinghaosu programme, while products such as Jinchai Antiviral Capsules, Shuyan Tablets, Huanglianjiedu Pills, Baoxin Granules and Jimu Granules have received clinical trial certificates. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the institute's expert groups contributed the pharmaceutical research for Qingfei Paidu Granules and Huashi Baidu Granules, both approved by the National Medical Products Administration on 2 March 2021, and the institute was named an Advanced Institution of the National Science and Technology System in the fight against COVID-19. Its major honours include a first prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award, a first prize of the Beijing Science and Technology Progress Award and the Li Shizhen Medicine Innovation Award.

Publications: The Institute's Journals

An Administrative Department of Journals within the institute publishes four periodicals distributed nationwide. The flagship is the China Journal of Chinese Materia Medica, one of China's two national academic periodicals in the field and the journal in which much of the institute's own output — from germplasm genomics to bile-powder pharmacopoeia studies — appears; alongside it are the Chinese Journal of Experimental Traditional Medical Formulae, the newer English-language Journal of Science of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and the Journal of Basic Traditional Chinese Medicine. Through these titles the institute acts not only as a research producer but as a gatekeeper and standard-setter for the discipline of Chinese materia medica scholarship in China, a publishing role that complements its laboratory standard-setting through the quality-control engineering laboratory and the dao-di herbs state key laboratory. Its 322 published books include the institute's own fifty-year institutional history, in which Tu Youyou's memoir of the qinghaosu journey appeared, preserving the primary-source record of the discovery inside the institute's official historiography.

International Cooperation and the WHO Role

The institute was designated a WHO Collaborating Center for Traditional Medicine in 1983 and has maintained high-level cooperation with the World Health Organization for more than four decades. As a collaborating centre it has carried out cooperation and talent exchanges with research institutes, universities, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and international organisations from more than 80 countries and regions. Joint platforms established with partners include a Chinese-European Co-research Center for Chinese Medicine and Natural Medicine with Leiden University in the Netherlands, a Chinese and Austrian Cooperative Research Center with the University of Graz, a Research Center for Biomechanopharmacology with the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, a Macau Center for R&D in Chinese Medicine with the University of Macau, and a Joint Laboratory for Sino-Zanzibar TCM Research on Infectious Diseases (Malaria) with the Zanzibar Health Research Institute in Tanzania — the last returning the institute's artemisinin expertise to cooperation with Africa, where the drug's impact has been greatest. The institute has recruited researchers trained at internationally renowned universities in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands and Japan, and its instrument base, headed by an AVANCE III 600 MHz digital NMR spectrometer, is valued in its official introduction at 413.8 million RMB of modern research equipment.

Education and Directory Facts

The institute trains postdoctoral researchers and doctoral and master's students in the subjects of Chinese materia medica and the integration of traditional Chinese and Western medicine, making it a degree-producing research institute as well as a laboratory system. For this directory, the fixed facts are: name, Institute of Chinese Materia Medica, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences; established 1955 in Beijing; location recorded as Nanxiao Road, Dongcheng District, Beijing (postcode 100700); WHO Collaborating Center for Traditional Medicine since 1983; more than 500 employees; parent body the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences; affiliated platforms including the State Key Laboratory for Quality Ensurance and Sustainable Use of Dao-di Herbs, the National Engineering Laboratory of Quality Control Technology of Chinese Materia Medica, the Resources Center for Chinese Materia Medica and the Artemisinin Research Center; 33 new medicines developed, 381 academic prizes including 28 national prizes, more than 7,113 papers and 322 books published; and four journals published in-house, led by the China Journal of Chinese Materia Medica. No official English website was recorded in this entry's source data; the institute's official Chinese website is icmm.ac.cn, whose English brief introduction supplied many of the institutional figures cited here. In the geography of Chinese science the institute occupies a singular place: it is where a fourth-century emergency handbook, a secret military-civilian drug programme and a modern pharmacology laboratory met, and where the most consequential drug ever to come out of traditional Chinese medicine was found.