Sweet Wormwood is a Chinese herbaceous plant known also as Sweet Sagewort and Sweet Annie. It features fern-like leaves, bright yellow flowers and a camphor-like smell. In contemporary central China, particularly Hubei Province it is eaten blended in a delicacy salad which is generally more costly to purchase than meat.

Artemisinin a common malarial drug is obtained from the sweet wormwood plant (Artemisia annua L). It is normally employed in those tropical nations which can afford it, as part of a combination-cocktail with other antimalarial drugs in order to prevent the development of parasite resistance.

The plant has also been shown to have anti-cancer properties. Scientists connected a chemical homing instrumentation, to artemisinin drug, that directs the chemical selectively to malignant neoplastic disease cells, but spares healthy cells, they report in the new issue of the journal Cancer Letters.

According to research workers at the University of Washington, the new chemical compound is 1,200 times more precise in killing certain forms of cancer cells than presently usable drugs and paves the way for a lot of effective chemotherapy drug with marginal side effects.

The artemisinin chemical compound takes advantage of cancer cell’s high iron levels.

Tomikazu Sasaki, at UW chemical science professor and senior writer of the university study said. “The chemical is like the equivalent of a special secret agent setting an explosive devise within the cell.”

Research workers essayed the artemisinin-based chemical on human leukemia cells, and detected it to selectively killing only the leukemia cells.

Sasaki said that the research has also shown leads displaying that the chemical compound is likewise selective and useful for human prostate and breast cancerous cells, and in essence it kills breast cancerous cells in rats safely.

He added that most accessible chemotherapies, to address cancer, are very cytotoxic and destructive to normal cells. On average one healthy cell is destroyed for every ten cancer cells.