All of those involved in the study were given artemisinin alongside conventional drugs to treat malaria.
OZ-277, has proved more effective than artemisinin itself in both the test-tube and in animal models of malaria.
Called Coartem, it combines a derivative of artemisinin, an extract from sweet wormwood bush, with a second drug, lumefantrine.
Professor Lai said a drug treatment based on artemisinin would be very cheap.
Resistance to artemisinin-based drugs reaching Africa would be a "massive crisis", she said.
In the meantime, the world will have to meet its growing demand for artemisinin the old-fashioned way, from nature.
"If used widely, this inexpensive, fixed-dose artemisinin-based combination antimalarial could make important contributions to 'rolling back malaria', " they wrote.
The researchers said they did not yet understand what genetic mutations had occurred that enabled the parasites to withstand artemisinin treatment.
But the great hope is to find a way of synthesising artemisinin in the laboratory, thereby freeing drugmakers from the vagaries of nature.
Now scientists are worried the same thing will happen with artemisinin.
That was how they produced artemisinin, which is also an isoprenoid.
Where chloroquine fails, artemisinin-based combination therapy is usually effective, but these pills are expensive and unfamiliar, so donor help will be important in promoting their use.
The International Artemisinin Study Group, which includes prominent malaria experts from around the world, examined the results of 16 trials carried out over the past decade.
As Jeffrey Li, the head of Novartis's Chinese operation, points out, there is also a shortage of facilities that can produce high quality artemisinin and its derivatives.
The focus now is on trying to monitor and contain artemisinin drug resistance into a few hotspots, prolonging the drug's effective lifespan globally until alternative treatments are available.
The wormwood plant had long been used by Chinese herbalists to treat fever, and researchers in China determined in the early 1970s that artemisinin worked to combat malaria.
Jonathan Vennerstrom, a researcher at the University of Nebraska, has come up with a five-step chemical process to make compounds that can mimic the action of artemisinin derivatives.
The biggest problem, at the moment, is getting enough artemisinin.
But Amyris Biotechnologies, which is also based in California, in Emeryville, and which also started by dabbling in drugs (in its case an antimalarial medicine called artemisinin), is slightly more forthcoming.
But the only firm that achieved any success was Novartis, which in 1998 developed Coartem, an antimalarial drug that combines artemisinin, an extract from the sweet wormwood plant, with a compound called lumefantrine.
After some dramatic successes in Rwanda, Zanzibar and elsewhere, a clear consensus is emerging: an ambitious strategy involving nets impregnated with long-lasting insecticide, indoor spraying of insecticides and pills using artemisinin-combination therapies can slash mortality.
ECONOMIST: A breakthrough moment in awareness of a terrible scourge
The problem, says Yan Xiaohua, the president of Guilin Pharmaceuticals, one of China's leading producers of artemisinin and its derivatives, is not that there are too few plants, but that the price of leaves has shot through the roof.
The supply chain starts with local farmers, who harvest the leaves in August, when they are richest in artemisinin, and sell then to a handful of companies, mainly Chinese, which extract the chemical and change it into one of the more active derivatives.
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