artemisinin   Click here for help

GtoPdb Ligand ID: 9954

Synonyms: qinghaosu
Antimalarial Ligand
Compound class: Natural product or derivative
Comment: Artemisinin is a sesquiterpene lactone with an unusual endoperoxide bridge, believed to be responsible for the antimalarial activity of the compound. It is a natural product, isolated from the qinghao or sweet wormwood plant (Artemisia annua) and used in Chinese traditional medicine to treat fever.
Artemisinin is a prodrug that is converted to the active metabolite artenimol (dihydroartemisinin).
We show one representation of artemisinin here. As with other natural products, there are alternative chemical structures due to the complex stereochemistry.

The Malaria tab on this ligand page provides additional curator comments of relevance to the Guide to MALARIA PHARMACOLOGY.
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Ligand Activity Visualisation Charts

These are box plot that provide a unique visualisation, summarising all the activity data for a ligand taken from ChEMBL and GtoPdb across multiple targets and species. Click on a plot to see the median, interquartile range, low and high data points. A value of zero indicates that no data are available. A separate chart is created for each target, and where possible the algorithm tries to merge ChEMBL and GtoPdb targets by matching them on name and UniProt accession, for each available species. However, please note that inconsistency in naming of targets may lead to data for the same target being reported across multiple charts.

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View interactive charts of activity data across species

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2D Structure
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2D Structure

An image of the ligand's 2D structure. For small molecules with SMILES these are drawn using the NCI/CADD Chemical Identifier Resolver. Click on the image to access the chemical structure search tool with the ligand pre-loaded in the structure editor. For other types of ligands, e.g. longer nucleotides and peptides, a manually drawn representation of the molecule may be provided.

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Physico-chemical Properties
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Physico-chemical Properties

Calculated molecular properties are available for small molecules and natural products (not peptides). Properties were generated using the CDK toolkit. All properties were selected to enable the prediction of the Lipinski Rule-of-Five profile or ‘druglikeness’ for each ligand. For more info on each category see the help pages.

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Hydrogen bond acceptors 5
Hydrogen bond donors 0
Rotatable bonds 0
Topological polar surface area 53.99
Molecular weight 282.15
XLogP 3.04
No. Lipinski's rules broken 0
SMILES / InChI / InChIKey
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SMILES / InChI / InChIKey

SMILES (Simplified Molecular Input Line Entry Specification) A specification for unambiguously describing the structure of chemical molecules using short ASCII strings. Canonical SMILES specify a unique representation of the 2D structure without chiral or isotopic specifications. Isomeric SMILES include chiral specification and isotopes.

Standard InChI (IUPAC International Chemical Identifier) and InChIKey InChI is a non-proprietary, standard, textual identifier for chemical substances designed to facilitate linking of information and database searching. An InChIKey is a simplified version of a full InChI, designed for easier web searching.

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Canonical SMILES O=C1OC2OC3(C)CCC4C2(C(C1C)CCC4C)OO3
Isomeric SMILES O=C1O[C@@H]2O[C@@]3(C)CC[C@@H]4[C@]2([C@H]([C@H]1C)CC[C@H]4C)OO3
InChI InChI=1S/C15H22O5/c1-8-4-5-11-9(2)12(16)17-13-15(11)10(8)6-7-14(3,18-13)19-20-15/h8-11,13H,4-7H2,1-3H3/t8-,9-,10+,11+,13-,14-,15-/m1/s1
InChI Key BLUAFEHZUWYNDE-NNWCWBAJSA-N
Guide to Malaria Pharmacology Comments
Artemisinin was first isolated in the early 1970s during antimalarial research initiated by the Chinese military (Project 523) and led to one half of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine being awarded to Tu Youyou for her work on the discovery and isolation of the compound [8].
A number of semisynthetic artemisinin derivatives have been developed that have an improved pharmacokinetic profile, these include artemether, artesunate, and artemotil.
Artemisinin and derivatives have potent activity against the asexual blood stage of P. falciparum (including chloroquine-resistant strains) and are characterised by an extremely rapid parasitemia clearance and a short terminal half-life of elimination. Combination therapies, containing an artemisinin derivative (artemisinin-combination therapies, ACTs), are recommended by the World Health Organization as the standard treatment for uncomplicated P. falciparum malaria [11].

Potential Target/Mechanism Of Action: As the precise mechanism of action of artemisinin is not yet known, we do not have a molecular target for this compound.