Saarbrücker researcher Rolf Müller wins TU Youyou Award 2024!

Saarbrücker researcher Rolf Müller wins TU Youyou Award 2024!

The "Tu Youyou Award", a prize that is awarded every two years of the mdpi sustainability foundation this year has honored Professor Rolf Müller for his outstanding achievements in the natural material and medication chemistry. Müller receives the award for the development of new antibiotics from microbial natural substances, a decisive contribution to combating the threat from multi -resistant bacteria.

The price that was launched in honor of the Nobel Prize winner TU Youyou 2016 is endowed with 100,000 Swiss francs. Rolf Müller, who works as a founding and scientific director of the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research in Saarland (HIPS), has a team that focuses on the isolation of unknown floor bacteria in order to gain pharmaceutically usable natural substances. Important developments in Müller’s research concern the discovery of active ingredients that are effective against many antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

award and recognition

Müller shares the price with Professor Richard Dimarchi from Indiana University Bloomington (USA). The Minister of Economic Affairs Jürgen Barke praised the HIPS as a "advanced institute for active ingredient research" and congratulated Müller on his award. Müller also coordinates the research area of ​​new antibiotics at the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF), which strengthens its role in the German Research Foundation.

tu Youyou, the namesake of the prize, received the Nobel Prize in 2015 for her discovery of the malaria drug Artemisinin. Your research work has significantly reduced the mortality rates in malaria patients and has had a significant impact on combating the disease worldwide. Artemisinin-based combination therapies are now recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) as standard treatment for malaria, a direct result of their discoveries during the Vietnam War.

The meaning of natural substances

The successes of Rolf Müller and Tu Youyou show the crucial role that plays natural remedies in medical research. An estimated 70% of all medicines are of natural origin. The discovery and research of natural fabrics remains important in order to find future remedies against various diseases. As the plant research , the chemical variety in nature is enormous, and many natural active substances are still unknown.

With screening processes that make it possible to test plant and bacterial extracts on their effect at the same time, innovative approaches in natural substance research are pursued. The preservation of biodiversity is of fundamental importance for the discovery of new active ingredients that could revolutionize our understanding of medicine and therapy.

The "Tu Youyou Award" remains a significant sign of recognition for excellent research that have the potential to solve global health problems and to further deepen the knowledge of nature.