Nobel Prize in Medicine 2024 to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their studies on micro RNA

The Nobel Prize for medicine was awarded to Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their discovery of microRNA (lin-4) a fundamental principle that controls the way gene activity is regulated. For the Nobel Assembly their discovery 'is proving to be fundamental to understanding the way organisms develop and function'.

MicroRNAs are in fact tiny pieces of RNA that play a key role in regulating gene activity and a single microRNA can control many different genes and a single gene can be regulated by several microRNAs.

When, in 1993, the teams of Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun reported that the development of Caenorhabditis elegans (a nematode worm widely used for the study of developmental biology and apoptosis) is modulated by a 22-nucleotide RNA, now called microRna (miRna), the significance of their discovery was initially underestimated. However, the field of miRna research took off when Ruvkun discovered a second miRna (let-7), which exists in several species. Almost 20 years later, we have gained a remarkable understanding of how miRNAs are produced and how they recognise and regulate the expression of target genes.

Their work 'paved the way for knowledge of these small elements of the RNA that serve to switch on and off certain genes, these switches that play a certain role in many human diseases such as diabetes, stroke, cancer. But they also play a role in inflammation. We are also working on the research of these two scientists in Italy, for example in my laboratory, because it is from their discoveries that a whole strand of work has started to develop certain drugs that can turn these switches off and on. The organism's response to certain therapies depends on the susceptibility of this microRNA,' comments Giuseppe Novelli, a geneticist at the Tor Vergata University in Rome. 'Theirs was basic work that opened up a very important line of research. It is a very well-deserved Nobel Prize in Medicine'.

Ambros was born in 1953 in Hanover, New Hampshire. He received his PhD from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in 1979, where he also did postdoctoral research from 1979 to 1985, when he became a principal investigator at Harvard University. He was a professor at Dartmouth Medical School from 1992 to 2007 and is now a professor of natural sciences at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Ruvkun was born in Berkeley, California, in 1952. He received his PhD from Harvard in 1982. From 1982 to 1985 he was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT. He became principal investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in 1985, where he is now professor of genetics.