Klas Kärre (born January 12, 1954, in Strasbourg, France) is a Swedish immunologist.
Kärre received his doctorate in 1981 at Karolinska Institutet[1] and is a professor of molecular immunology at Karolinska Institutet since 1993.
In the mid-1980s Kärre discovered one of the mechanisms for how cells of the immune system, natural killer cells (NK cells), identify their target cells and kill them.[2] The findings were that the NK cells are inhibited by a transplantation antigen, the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I, which prevents NK cells from killing their target cells. When MHC class I is removed from the target cells, they are killed by the NK cells. Kärre named this phenomenon "the missing self hypothesis".
Kärre became a member of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine in 2006 and its chairman in 2009.[3] In 2009, he was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.[4] Kärre is a member of the council for the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings.[5]
In 1998, he was presented with the William B. Coley Award.
References edit
- ^ Kärre, Klas (1981): On the immunobiology of natural killer cells: studies of murine NK-cells and their interactions with T-cells and T-lymphomas, Diss., Stockholm
- ^ Kärre et al., "Selective rejection of H-2-deficient lymphoma variants suggests alternative immune defence strategy", Nature, 1986 Feb 20-26;319(6055):675-8
- ^ The Nobel Committee 2009 Archived 2009-10-13 at the Wayback Machine, accessed on September 29, 2009
- ^ Five prominent researchers elected to the Academy, press announcement from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 2009-12-16
- ^ "About". The Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings. Retrieved 2018-09-17.
External links edit
- Web page of the Klas Kärre Group at Karolinska Institutet Archived 2011-07-18 at the Wayback Machine