Whilst Japan struggled to recover from the devastation of World War II, husband and wife researchers, Drs. Utako and Shosuke Okamoto, were making medical history driven by the desire to reduce death from haemorrhage especially death after childbirth from postpartum haemorrhage which was a major killer of women in Japan at that time.
Working at times on blood drawn from their own veins at times, in September 1962, writing in the Keio Journal of Medicine, the researchers reported the invention of a new chemical entity called Epsilon-aminocaproic acid (EACA) that inhibited the enzymatic breakdown of fibrin by plasmin.
Later, they developed the much more potent form of the drug, tranexamic acid for which its full potential to reduce death from bleeding would not be recognized for decades.