Klas Kärre (born January 12, 1954, in Strasbourg, France) is a Swedish immunologist.
Kärre received his doctorate in 1981 at Karolinska Institutet 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. 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. In 2009, he was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Kärre is a member of the council for the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings.
In 1998, he was presented with the William B. Coley Award.
References
- 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
- Web page of the Klas Kärre Group at Karolinska Institutet Archived 2011-07-18 at the Wayback Machine