Nobel prize for medicine goes to US duo who discovered microRNA

US scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Medicine on Monday for the discovery of microRNA and its crucial role in how multicellular organisms grow and live.

Their work helped explain how cells specialize and develop into different types, such as muscle and nerve cells, even though all the cells in an individual contain the same set of genes and instructions for growing and staying alive.

"The Nobel's, you know, there's a word we use for Major League Baseball, it's called 'The Show'. Which means it's not any show, it's THE show," Ruvkun told Reuters, describing what it was like being thrust into the global spotlight.

The duo won Israel's prestigious Wolf prize in 2014, which is widely considered to be the precursor to the Nobel prize had been. Ruvkun, who is Jewish, also previously won the prestigious Dan David Prize, headquartered at Tel Aviv University. 

"That's been great. He's a wonderful guy," Ruvkun added by phone. Ambros seconded by saying he was happy to share the award with "a great friend."

Ruvkun now joins the list of Jewish Nobel Prize winners for medicine. People of Jewish descent make up around 26% of the world total, according to JINFO. 

His parents, the late Sam and Doron Ruvkun, have a foundation in the name called Sam and Dora Ruvkun Advanced Planning Endowment for Projects, which provides funding for various programs and universities including Bar-Ilan in Ramat Gan, and the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot.

It is not just Ruvkun who has a connection to Jews or Israel; Ambros, who is not Jewish, was listed as one of the donors to Hand in Hand - the Center for Jewish-Arab Education in Israel - in 2017. Hand in Hand runs 14 schools throughout the country, which claim to take an inclusive and bilingual approach to education.

'Groundbreaking discovery'

The Nobel Assembly, the award-giving body, said in a statement that the laureates discovered a new class of tiny RNA molecules, which 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," the assembly said.

Also speaking to Reuters, Ambros described microRNA as a "communication network amongst genes that enables the cells in our bodies to generate all kinds of different complex structures and functions."

Ambros is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, while Ruvkun is a professor at Harvard Medical School and is also affiliated with Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

In the late 1980s, Ambros and Ruvkun undertook postdoctorate studies in the laboratory of Robert Horvitz, himself a Nobel Prize winner in 2002, studying a 1 mm long roundworm.

Their discoveries on how certain microRNAs in the roundworm govern the growth of organs and tissue were initially dismissed as specific to the species.

More work published by Ruvkun's research group in 2000, however, showed that all animal life had relied on the mechanism for more than 500 million years.

Building blocks for life

MicroRNA comes into play when single-strand messenger RNA - the subject of last year's Nobel Prize in medicine - is decoded and translated into making proteins, the building blocks of all human and animal life.

Messenger RNA, or mRNA, emerges from the universal blueprint in every cell nucleus, the double-helix DNA.

Professor Gunilla Karlsson Hedestam of the Karolinska Institute said that, while the 2023 prize was linked to the specific use in COVID-19 vaccines, this year's award was for a leap in basic understanding with many potential future applications.

Janosch Heller, Assistant Professor in Biomedical Sciences at Dublin City University, who was not involved in selecting the winners, said that the findings had boosted the understanding of diseases such as epilepsy.

The winners of the prize for physiology or medicine are selected by the Nobel Assembly of Sweden's Karolinska Institute medical university and receive a prize sum of $1.1 million.

As in every year, the physiology or medicine prize was the first in the crop of Nobels, arguably the most prestigious prizes in science, literature and humanitarian endeavor, with the remaining five set to be unveiled over the coming days.

Created in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel, the prizes have been awarded for breakthroughs in science, literature and peace since 1901, while economics is a later addition.

Past winners of the Nobel medicine prize include many famous researchers, such as Ivan Pavlov in 1904, most known for his experiments on behavior using dogs, and Alexander Fleming, who shared the 1945 prize for the discovery of penicillin.

Last year's medicine prize was awarded to the runaway favorites Katalin Kariko, a Hungarian scientist, and US colleague Drew Weissman, for discoveries that paved the way for COVID-19 vaccines that helped curb the pandemic.

Steeped in tradition, the science, literature, and economics prizes are presented to the laureates in a ceremony on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death, followed by a lavish banquet at Stockholm city hall. Separate festivities attend the winner of the peace prize in Oslo on the same day. ($1 = 10.1086 Swedish crowns)