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Hi Charles, my draft review is finally complete. As contributing author I'd be very grateful if you could read it through, add anything or amend? I've sent you a link.

Thanks, DC.

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Jun 2, 2022Liked by Charles Wright

Love this article. Don’t forget the 2015 Nobel prize for Artemisia Annua. I believe that everyone’s need to extract a “drug” reflects the deep racism and bias of Western medicine. The whole herb is great, cheap, and easy to take.

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It's in there, sort of.. I quoted Tu Youyou from her biography she provided to the Nobel Prize Committee on how she reviewed all of the ancient Chinese medical literature looking for antimalarial compounds. She made extracts of around 100 ancient recipes for testing.

She didn't have good results at first. Then she reviewed the literature a second time, and it occurred to her that their hot water extraction methods were damaging the chemical compounds. So they tested A. annua again with a cold extraction, and it was a stunning success. That's why I suggest that testing of A. annua should use cold press extractions if it is extracted.

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Awesome work Charles, you've completed the review yourself and I may struggle to add much more to that!

Apart from the need for low temperature extraction, the principle difference to other therapeutics we have considered so far is that the Artemisinin's and extracts from the herb aren't a single compound but a group that work synergistically together. This makes detailed analysis challenging and as you say symptomatic studies may provide the best path forward. Food for thought and if I may quote your work verbatim? Thanks, DC.

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Absolutely. I'm going to look at the anti-cancer papers next.

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I have this so far from quite an old publication: "Artemisia - Medicinal and Aromatic Plants - Industrial Profiles" (2002):

Cytotoxic agents

Costunolides (sesquiterpene lactones) with antitumoral activity have been isolated

from Artemisia balchanorum (Herout and Sorm 1959). Several terpenoids and

flavonoids, isolated from Artemisia annua, showed significant cytotoxic activity

when tested in vitro on several human tumour cell lines; among them artemisinin

and quercetagetin proved to be responsible for the action observed on five of the

tumour lines tested (Zheng 1994). Immunomodulatory activity of solvent extracts of

the air-dried aerial parts of A. annua has been demonstrated, through a study of

their in vitro effects on human complement and T lymphocyte proliferation (Kroes

et al., 1995).

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Thanks, I will include it. I have a few so far:

The anti-malarial drug artesunate causes cell cycle arrest and apoptosis of triple-negative MDA-MB-468 and HER2-enriched SK-BR-3 breast cancer cells https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30660598/

Progress on the study of the anticancer effects of artesunate https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8436334/

Editorial: Anticancer Potential of Artemisia annua https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30660598/

I'm sure there are plenty more. I have plenty to get started. Thanks DC!

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