2 scientists share medicine Nobel for discovery of microRNA

The 2024 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their discovery of microRNA, a new class of tiny RNA molecules that play a crucial role in gene regulation.

The Nobel Prize committee announced the prestigious honour in Sweden on Monday.

The Karolinska Institutet awarded the Prize to the scientists for their groundbreaking discovery in the small worm C. elegans, which has revealed a completely new principle of gene regulation, The Nobel Assembly said in a press release.

This turned out to be essential for multicellular organisms, including humans. MicroRNAs are proving to be fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function.

This year's medicine laureates Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun studied a relatively unassuming 1 mm long roundworm, C. elegans.

Despite its small size, C. elegans possesses many specialised cell types such as nerve and muscle cells also found in larger, more complex animals, making it a useful model for investigating how tissues develop and mature in multicellular organisms.

In 1993, this year's Nobel Prize laureates published unexpected findings describing a new level of gene regulation, which turned out to be highly significant and conserved throughout evolution.

The information stored within our chromosomes can be likened to an instruction manual for all cells in our body.

Every cell contains the same chromosomes, so every cell contains exactly the same set of genes and exactly the same set of instructions.

This year's Laureates Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were interested in how different cell types develop. How different cell types, such as muscle and nerve cells, have very distinct characteristics and how these differences arise?

The answer lies in gene regulation, which allows each cell to select only the relevant instructions. This ensures that only the correct set of genes is active in each cell type.

If gene regulation goes awry, it can lead to serious diseases such as cancer, diabetes, or autoimmunity. Understanding the regulation of gene activity has been an important goal for many decades, the Nobel committee said.

Incidentally, in the late 1980s, both Ambros and Ruvkun were postdoctoral fellows in the laboratory of Robert Horvitz, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002, alongside Sydney Brenner and John Sulston.

Ambros was born in 1953 in Hanover, New Hampshire, US and received his PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, in 1979 where he also did postdoctoral research 1979-1985.

He became a Principal Investigator at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA in 1985.

He was Professor at Dartmouth Medical School from 1992-2007 and he is now Silverman Professor of Natural Science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA.

Meanwhile, Ruvkun was born in Berkeley, California, US in 1952. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1982 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, 1982-1985.

He became a Principal Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in 1985, where he is now Professor of Genetics.

The medicine prize has been awarded 114 times to a total of 227 laureates. Only 13 women have won been awarded the prize. Physiology or Medicine was the third prize category that Alfred Nobel mentioned in his will.

Since 1901, the medicine laureates have been selected by the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet.

Nobel announcements continue with the physics prize on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on October 14.