"Worcester Mass.  When the standard malaria medications failed to help  critically ill patients the attending physician in a Congo clinic acted under the compassionate use doctrine and prescribed a notyetapproved malaria therapy made only from the dried leaves of the Artemisia annua plant. In just five days all  people fully recovered. This small but stunningly successful trial offers hope to address the growing problem of drugresistant malaria. Details of the cases are documented in the paper Artemisia annua dried leaf tablets treated malaria resistant to ACT and i.v. artesunate case reports by an international team lead by Pamela Weathers PhD professor of biology and biotechnology at Worcester Polytechnic Institute WPI who has pioneered the use of dried leaves of Artemisia annua DLA as a malaria therapy. To our knowledge this is the first report of driedleaf Artemisia annua controlling ACTresistant malaria in humans the authors of the Phytomedicine http paper note adding that more comprehensive clinical trials on patients with drugresistant malaria are warranted. Successful treatment of all  ACTresistant cases suggests that DLA should be rapidly incorporated into the antimalarial regimen for Africa they added and possibly wherever else ACT resistance has emerged. Watch a video https_cfeatureyoutu.be about research at WPI related to this study. The report documents the experiences of  patients in the North Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of Congo who showed symptoms of malaria and were originally treated with the recommended medication artemisininbased combination therapy ACT which blends artemisinin a chemical extract from Artemisia annua with one or more other drugs that attack the malaria parasite in different ways. The  patients ranging in age from  months to  years did not respond to the standard ACT treatment and all lapsed into severe malaria defined by symptoms that can include loss of consciousness respiratory distress convulsions and pulmonary edema. One patient a fiveyearold child became comatose. All were then treated with intravenously administered artesunate the frontline medication for severe malaria but again they showed no improvement. As a last resort doctors turned to driedleaf Artemisia DLA a therapy developed and extensively studied by Weathers and her team at WPI. After five days of treatment with tablets made from only the dried and powered leaves of Artemisia which has been prepared and analyzed using methods developed by Weathers and postdoctoral fellow Melissa Towler all  patients fully recovered. Laboratory tests showed they had no parasites remaining in their blood. Weathers noted more than  other drugresistant patients also have been successfully treated with DLA tablets. These  patients were dying Weathers said. So to see  percent recover even the child who had lapsed into a coma was just amazing. Its a small study but the results are powerful. According to the World Health Organization WHO more than  million people contracted malaria in  and some  died with young children and pregnant women being particularly vulnerable. Caused by a mosquitoborne parasite the illness is reported in nearly  countries and threatens nearly half of the worlds population. ACT the current recommended therapy is expensive to produce and is in short supply in areas hit hardest by the disease. In addition while the combination therapy is designed to be less prone to the drug resistance that has rendered previous antimalarial agents ineffective increasingly the malaria parasite is showing signs of resistance to ACT particularly in Southeast Asia. Weathers began her research on artemisinin and Artemesia annua also known as sweet wormwood more than  years ago. In recent years she has turned her attention to the use of DLA as an alternative to conventional antimalarial drugs. Noting that Artemisia annua which is classified as a generally regarded as safe GRAS herb has been consumed by humans and used as an herbal therapy for thousands of years often in the form of a tea she became intrigued by the potential for using the dried plant rather than just a chemical extract as a malaria treatment. A study she published in Photochemistry Reviews in  was the first to demonstrate that dried leaves of the Artemisia annua plant delivers  times more artemisinin to the blood than does the drug based on the chemical extract of the plant. In a paper published in PLOS ONE the following year Weathers and her team showed that not only does DLA have antimalarial properties it is more effective in knocking out the parasite and reduced the level of parasite infection more completely in mice. In a  study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the WPI researchers with colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Amherst showed that dried Artemisia leaves cured rodents infected with malaria strains that were known to be resistant to artemisinin. And in an experiment that accelerated the evolution of the malaria parasite by passing it through up to  generations of mice the parasite showed no signs of resistance to DLA. Weathers says the superior performance of DLA in comparison to ACT as well as its ability to kill drugresistant parasites and avoid the resistance trap itself is likely due to the synergistic effects of a complex array of phytochemicals contained in the plants leaves several of which are also known to have antimalarial properties and others of which may act both to enhance the absorption of artemisinin into the bloodstream and bolster its effectiveness against malaria. In effect the dried leaves constitute a robust natural combination therapy one whose benefits far surpass those of ACT and other combination drugs. We have done a lot of work to understand the biochemistry of these compounds which include a number of flavonoids and terpenes so we can better understand the role they play in the pharmacological activity of the dried leaves Weathers said. The more we learn the more excited we become about the potential for DLA to be the medication of choice for combatting malaria worldwide. Artemisia annua is known to be efficacious against a range of other diseases including other tropical maladies and certain cancers so in our lab we are already at work investigating the effectiveness of DLA with other diseases. Another advantage of DLA over conventional malaria treatments is its low cost and the relative simplicity of its manufacture Weathers said. While the processes for manufacturing ACT is costlier and requires a higher degree of expertise producing DLA tablets can be accomplished with simpler equipment and a modest amount of training. Growing Artemisia annua and producing and testing the tablets Weathers noted are ideal local business that can provide jobs in impoverished areas and greatly expand access to antimalarial therapy. In fact she has already established a supply chain in Africa that includes growing and harvesting highproducing cultivars in East Africa along with GMP Good Manufacturing Practice processing operations in Uganda where the leaves are dried pulverized and homogenized where the powder is compacted into tablets and where the tablets are tested to verify their dosage. This supply chain helped produce the tablets used to treat the  patients in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This simple technology can be owned operated and distributed by Africans for Africans Weathers said.  About Worcester Polytechnic Institute Founded in  in Worcester Mass. WPI is one of the nations first engineering and technology universities. Its  academic departments offer more than  undergraduate and graduate degree programs in science engineering technology business the social sciences and the humanities and arts leading to bachelors masters and doctoral degrees. WPIs talented faculty work with students on interdisciplinary research that seeks solutions to important and socially relevant problems in fields as diverse as the life sciences and bioengineering energy information security materials processing and robotics. Students also have the opportunity to make a difference to communities and organizations around the world through the universitys innovative Global Projects Program. There are more than  WPI project centers throughout the Americas Africa AsiaPacific and Europe."