The Nobel Assembly at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet today awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to American scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for discovering microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation.
Ambros and Ruvkun discovered a fundamental principle governing how gene activity is regulated.
They discovered microRNA -- a new class of tiny RNA molecules that is critically involved in controlling and regulating genes. Their monumental discoveries revealed an entirely novel principle of gene regulation that was to prove to be decisively essential to multicellularity and therefore to human life.
Their research demonstrated that the human genome specifies more than one thousand microRNAs. These are proving to be fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function.
Proteins in the nucleus regulate RNA transcription and splicing. MicroRNAs, however, control the translation and degradation of mRNA in the cytoplasm, the academy said. This unsuspected layer of post-transcriptional gene regulation has had critical importance throughout animal development and cell types in adult life, it added.
The scientists will share a joint prize sum of 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).
Ambros was born in New Hampshire in 1953. Ambros received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA in 1979. He did postdoctoral work at the same university from 1979 - 1985. Currently he is Silverman Professor of Natural Science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA. Ruvkun was born in California in 1952. He obtained his PhD from Harvard University in 1982. Presently he is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School.
Every year, it confers the distinguished award from the Nobel Assembly composed of 50 professors at Karolinska Institutet, recognizing personnel who have provided significant contributions in the field of medicine for the benefit of humankind.
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