Nobel Prize In Medicine Awarded To Victor Ambros, Gary Ruvkun For Revolutionary Work On MicroRNA

Nobel Prize 2024 Medicine:  Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, two American scientists have jointly won the 2024 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for the groundbreaking discovery of microRNA and its role in gene regulation, the Nobel Foundation announced on Monday. Their discovery proved to be fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function, the foundation said.

The Nobel assembly said that the laureates discovered a new class of microRNA which has a crucial role in the gene regulation in organisms.

Nobel Prize 2024 For Medicine

"Their groundbreaking discovery revealed a completely new principle of gene regulation that turned out to be essential for multicellular organisms, including humans. It is now known that the human genome codes for over one thousand microRNAs," The Nobel Assembly at Sweden's Karolinska Institute said on Tuesday in an official statement.

"Their surprising discovery revealed an entirely new dimension to gene regulation," it added.

Explaining the pathbreaking discovery of the two laureates, the Nobel Foundation emphasised how gene regulation works.

"Every cell contains the same chromosomes, so every cell contains the same set of genes and the same set of instructions. Yet, different cell types, such as muscle and nerve cells, have very distinct characteristics. 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," it stated in the detailed scientific explanation provided with the award.

"Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were interested in how different cell types develop. They discovered microRNA, a new class of tiny RNA molecules that play a crucial role in gene regulation," the statement added.

Who Are Victor Ambros And Gary Ruvkun

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) doctorate, Victor Ambros worked as the Principal Investigator at Harvard University, Cambridge before working as a professor at Dartmouth Medical School. At the time of discovery, he was working as a Professor of Natural Science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Victor Ambros was born in 1953 in Hanover, New Hampshire, USA.

Gary Ruvkun is a professor of Genetics at the Harvard Medical School. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1982. Ruvkun was born in Berkeley, California, USA in 1952.