Chinese Nobel Prize Laureate Tu Youyou was honored with 2019 UNESCO-Equatorial Guinea International Prize for Research in the Life Sciences, announced the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in Paris on Tuesday. 

Tu, along with U.S. doctor Cato Laurencin and Irish professor Kevin McGuigan, won the fifth edition of the award for their "outstanding scientific research projects in the life sciences that have led to an improvement in the quality of human life." Tu, laureate of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Medicine, "is recognized for her research into parasitic diseases.""She discovered an entirely new anti-malarial treatment, artemisinin, which made possible the treatment of thousands of patients in China in the 1980s," UNESCO said in a press release. 

The award ceremony will take place at the African Union Headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, during the African Union Heads of State Summit in February 2020.