Utako Okamoto

Utako Okamoto
Okamoto in 2012
Born	1 April 1918 Tokyo, Japan
Died	21 April 2016(2016-04-21) (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
Sub-specialties	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 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.