MicroRNA Pioneers 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.