Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun get Nobel Prize 2024 for Physiology or Medicine

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Medicine has been awarded to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun.

Ambros and Ruvkun have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation.

Ambros is the Silverman Chair in Natural Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School and Ruvkun is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School.

The Nobel Assembly made the decision for the world’s top honour in medicine on Monday.

In a press release, the Nobel Assembly on Monday said that Ambros and Ruvkun discovered microRNA, a new class of tiny RNA molecules that play a crucial role in gene regulation.

“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. Their surprising discovery revealed an entirely new dimension to gene regulation. MicroRNAs are proving to be fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function,” said the Nobel Assembly in the release.

The discovery is likely to have implications in cancer research. MicroRNAs expression is dysregulated in human cancer through various mechanisms, including amplification or deletion of miRNA genes, abnormal transcriptional control of MicroRNAs, dysregulated epigenetic changes and defects in the miRNA biogenesis machinery, according to an article in Nature journal.

The article further notes that studies have identified MicroRNAs can be a potential biomarker in diagnosis of cancer and the development of therapeutic targets or tools. The article added that MicroRNAs regulate the development of human tumours by acting as tumour suppressors or oncogenes.