The 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine award has recently recognised the work of the driving forces behind two major breakthroughs in tropical medicine or global health, the field in which we also work at the University of Navarra's high school Tropical Health.

Two of the award winners, William Campbell and Satoshi Omura, worked together during the 1970s and 1980s to develop ivermectin - a drug described by many as a "wonder drug" because of its broad spectrum of action against intestinal and skin parasites. Indeed, ivermectin now represents our main line of attack against onchocerciasis (or river blindness), a disease that until recently wreaked havoc in rural areas of Africa and Latin America, blinding entire populations.

group The German pharmaceutical company Merck patented ivermectin and decided to donate millions of doses to countries where river blindness was endemic. Although it did not cure the disease, the new compound succeeded in preventing blindness, with all the social and health implications that this entailed. Today, some 100 million people worldwide are treated with ivermectin each year, and Merck's donation programme has since its inception provided more than two billion doses free of charge.

The third 2015 Nobel Laureate in Medicine is Chinese scientist Youyou Tu, who has played a role core topic in the finding and subsequent development of artemisinin: a plant derivative used in traditional Chinese medicine that has become the most important drug for the treatment of malaria. Artemisinin and its derivatives have a rapid and potent action against malaria-causing Plasmodium parasites. Therefore, artemisinin derivatives, used in combination, are the World Health Organisation's recommended treatment for malaria worldwide. In 2013 alone, there were an estimated 200 million cases of malaria, which still causes around 500,000 deaths each year. Without artemisinin, the death toll would be much higher.

For scientists working on one of the Malaria lines at high school of Tropical Health at the University of Navarra (ISTUN), this award Nobel Prize in Medicine is of special interest because our work is, in a way, a combination of the work undertaken by the three laureates. On the one hand, we use ivermectin which, when found in blood above a certain level, not only kills intestinal parasites, but is also capable of killing the mosquitoes (malaria vectors) that feed on the treated person. Thus our line at research suggests that ivermectin - used appropriately - is a potential tool for the control of malaria: a disease that, it is worth remembering, still kills a child every minute.