Utako Okamoto
| Utako Okamoto | |
|---|---|
Okamoto in 2012
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| Born | 1 April 1918 Tokyo, Japan |
| Died | 21 April 2016 (aged 98) Kobe, Japan |
| Nationality | Japanese |
| Education | Tokyo Women's Medical University (MD) |
| Occupation | medical doctor |
| Years active | 1945–2014 |
| Known for | discovered tranexamic acid |
| Relatives | Shosuke Okamoto (husband), Kumi Nakamura (daughter) |
| Medical career | |
| Institutions | Keio University, Kobe Gakuin University |
| Specialism | antiplasmin |
| Research | blood / hemostasis |
Utako Okamoto (岡本歌子 Okamoto Utako?, 1 April 1918 – 21 April 2016) was a Japanese medical doctor working as a medical scientist who discovered tranexamic acid in the 1950s in her quest to find a drug that would treat bleeding after childbirth (post-partum haemorrhage). After publishing results in 1962 she became a chair at Kobe Gakuin University, where she worked from 1966 until her retirement in 1990. Okamoto's career was hampered by a very male dominated environment. During her lifetime she was unable to persuade obstetricians at Kobe to trial the antifibrinolytic agent, which had become a drug on the WHO list of essential medicines in 2009. She lived to see the 2010 beginning of the study of tranexamic acid in 15 000 women with post-partum haemorrhage, but died before its completion in 2016.
Okamoto began studying dentistry in 1936. She very soon switched to medicine enrolling at the Tokyo Women's Medical University and graduated in December 1941.
In January 1942, Okamoto started out as a research assistant at Tokyo Women's Medical University researching the cerebellum under a neurophysiologist who "created many more opportunities for [women] than were otherwise available at the time." After World War II and the Second Sino-Japanese War respectively in 1945, she moved to Keio University in Shinanomachi in Tokyo. As resources were scarce, she and her husband Shosuke Okamoto changed to research on blood: "If there was not enough we could simply use our own". They hoped to find a treatment for post-partum haemorrhage, a potent drug to stop bleeding after childbirth. They began by studying epsilon-amino-caproic acid (EACA). They then studied a related chemical, 1-(aminomethyl)-cyclohexane-4-carboxylic acid (AMCHA), also known as tranexamic acid. The Okamotos found it was 27 times as powerful and thus a promising hemostatic agent and published their findings in the Keio Journal of Medicine in 1962.
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