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Two American scientists have won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of microRNA “and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation,” the Nobel committee announced Monday.
Victor Ambros, who is affiliated with the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and Gary Ruvkun, who is at Harvard Medical School, shared the prize for their work in advancing the understanding of how gene activity is regulated, according to a press release.
Ambros and Ruvkun sought to understand how different types of cells—say, muscle versus nerve—develop, given that they all contain the same chromosomes with the same set of instructions. They discovered “a new class of tiny RNA molecules,” the Nobel committee wrote, which translates DNA into the proper proteins needed for each type of cell.
“Having a basic understanding is of course the first step towards developing applications,” immunologist Gunilla Karlsson Hedestam, chair of the Nobel committee, said in the announcement. “Although there are no very clear applications available yet with microRNAs, understanding them, knowing that they exist, understanding their regulatory networks is always the first step.”
