Ambros and Ruvkun Win 2024 Nobel Prize in Medicine

U.S. scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun win the 2024 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery of microRNA.
Their work explains how microRNA helps cells specialize, a crucial breakthrough for understanding multicellular organisms.
Ambros and Ruvkun's discovery, initially studied in roundworms, is now known to apply to all animals for over 500 million years.

U.S. scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering microRNA and its key role in how multicellular organisms grow and function. Their work explains how cells, despite having the same genes, specialize into different types like muscle or nerve cells.

Ruvkun humorously compared winning the Nobel to making it to the "big leagues" and joked about his long-time collaboration with Ambros. Both expressed joy at sharing the award as friends.

The Nobel Assembly highlighted that their discovery of microRNA, tiny molecules that regulate genes, revealed a crucial new principle for all multicellular life. Ambros described microRNA as a gene communication network essential for creating complex structures in the body.

Ambros, from UMass Chan Medical School, and Ruvkun, of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, first studied microRNA in roundworms in the late 1980s. Their research, once dismissed as species-specific, was later proven to apply to all animals for over 500 million years.

MicroRNA, the focus of this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine, plays a key role in how mRNA is translated into proteins, essential for life. Last year's prize recognized mRNA's use in COVID-19 vaccines, while this year's award marks a fundamental leap in understanding biology, with potential to impact many fields, including disease research.

The prize, awarded by Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, comes with 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million). Past winners include pioneers like Alexander Fleming for penicillin. The prize will be formally awarded on Dec. 10, alongside other Nobel honors.

Edited by Harshajit Sarmah