Klas Kärre

Klas Kärre ( born January 12, 1954 in Strasbourg, France) is a Swedish physician and immunologist and since 1993 professor at the Karolinska Institutet. Among his scientific achievements, for which he received the William B. Coley among other Award and was inducted into the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, one in particular the study of the mechanism of differentiation of healthy cells of virus-infected cells or tumor cells by natural killer cells.

Life

Klas Kärre was born in 1954 in the French Strasbourg and graduated in 1981 to study medicine with a PhD at the Karolinska Institutet from. The mid-1980s he published based on the results of his thesis, the so-called missing- self hypothesis. This describes how a particular group of immune cells of the immune system, natural killer cells ( NK cells), healthy endogenous cells differ on the surface of virus-infected cells or tumor cells by means of protein structures (signal protein ). The recognition of autologous cells is a key process for the function of NK cells, and thus an important principle in the immune response.

Klas Kärre is since 1993 Professor of Molecular Immunology at the Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology, Karolinska Institutet. Since 2006 he is a member of the Nobel Committee consisting of fifteen members, which selects the winners from the nominations for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Awards

Klas Kärre received for his work on the 1998 William B. Coley Award for outstanding research in general immunology and tumor immunology, 2001 with prize money of 100 000 Swiss francs Novartis Prize for general immunology and the 2004 Avery - Landsteiner Prize of the German Society for Immunology. In 2009, he was inducted into the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Publications

• On the immunobiology of natural killer cells. Studies of murine NK cells and Their interactions with T -cells and T- lymphomas. Dissertation, University of Stockholm in 1981.