Project 523

Project 523 (or task number five hundred and twenty-three; Chinese: 523项目) is a code name for the secret military project of the People's Republic of China during and after the Cultural Revolution, for antimalarial medications, which were urged in the Vietnam War. The name stood for 23 May, the day the project was launched in 1967. It was aimed at finding new drugs for malaria, the disease which claimed more lives than the actual battles. At the behest of Hồ Chí Minh, Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (then North Vietnam), Zhou Enlai, the Premier of the People's Republic of China, convinced Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Communist Party of China, to start a mass project for development of new antimalarial drug "to keep [the] allies' troops combat-ready", as they put down in the meeting minute. More than 500 Chinese scientists were recruited. The project was divided into two streams, one for developing synthetic compounds, and the other for investigating traditional Chinese medicine. The latter proved to be the more fruitful, directly resulting in the discovery and development of a class of new antimalarial drugs called artemisinins. It was officially terminated in 1981.

For their high efficacy, safety and stability, artemisinins such as artemether and artesunate became the drugs of choice in falciparum malaria. Their combination drugs are advocated by the World Health Organization, and are included in the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines. Among the scientists of the project, Zhou Yiqing and his team at the Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology of the Chinese Academy of Military Medical Sciences, were awarded the European Inventor Award of 2009 in the category "Non-European countries" for the development of Coartem (artemether-lumefantrine combination drug).Tu Youyou of the Qinghaosu Research Center, Institute of Chinese Materia Medica, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, received both the 2011 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award and 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her role in the discovery of artemisinin.