Stockholm

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 specialized 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 the same set of genes and the same set of instructions.

This year's Laureates Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were interested in how different cell types develop. How do different cell types, such as muscle and nerve cells, have very distinct characteristics and how do 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 from 1979-1985.