Utako Okamoto, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetUtako Okamoto
Japanese medical doctor
Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Tokyo, Japan
About Utako Okamoto
- Utako Okamoto (????, 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 20 000 women with post-partum haemorrhage, but died before its completion in 2016 and the publication of tranexamic acids fatality preventing results in 2017, that she had predicted.
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