Nobel Prize in Medicine 2024: Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun win the award for advances in gene regulation

He Nobel Prize in Medicine It fell this Monday to American researchers Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their discovery of microRNA, a new type of tiny RNA molecule that plays a crucial role in regulating gene activity.

MicroRNAs “are of fundamental importance for the development and functioning of organisms,” the Swedish Academy jury said in a statement.

“A disturbance in gene regulation can cause serious diseases, such as cancer, diabetes or autoimmunity. Therefore, understanding the regulation of gene activity has been an important objective for several decades.”he added.

Ambros, 70, is a biologist at Massachusetts Medical School, and Ruvkun, 72, is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. In 1993 they published their findings on “a new level of gene regulation” in two separate articles, which were decisive.

“It’s incredible!” Ruvkun told AFP by phone after hearing the news, while his dog barked in front of the door of the house, where other journalists arrived.

The researcher specified that they had been “friends for years” with Ambros: “It is something magnificent and we are going to celebrate it like crazy,” he added.

The second laureate, his compatriot Victor Ambros, showed the same enthusiasm. “Wow! It’s amazing! “I didn’t know,” he told the Swedish public radio SR reporter who gave him the good news, given that the jury had not been able to contact him before.

The two researchers, who collaborate together but work separately, carried out their work using a one-millimeter roundworm, C. elegans, to determine why and when cellular mutations occur.

Each cell contains the same chromosomes and therefore exactly the same set of genes and instructions. Gene regulation allows each cell to select only the relevant instructions.

The two researchers became interested in how different types of cells develop and discovered microRNAs.

“Their revolutionary discovery revealed a new principle of gene regulation that turned out to be crucial for multicellular organisms, including humans.“, notes the statement.

This discovery led to “numerous trials (that are) ongoing, and not only against cancer, but also against other diseases (…), but there is nothing close to a real application,” said Gunilla Karlsson Hedestam, professor from the Karolinska Institute.

Eric Miska, a geneticist at the University of Cambridge, highlighted to AFP the importance of the study of cellular mutations in C. elegans, carried out by the two biologists.

“The same small RNA that is found in this worm and is important for its development is found in you and me. And it has an important function, in fact, it turns out to be a tumor suppressor,” he explained.

A “white year”

Last year, the Nobel Prize in Medicine It went to Hungarian researcher Katalin Kariko and American Drew Weissman for the development of messenger RNA technology that paved the way for the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines.

The prize carries a reward of 11 million crowns (more than one million dollars), which is shared if there are multiple winners.

The season of these prestigious awards will continue on Tuesday with Physics, on Wednesday with Chemistry, before the most anticipated Literature, on Thursday, and Peace, on Friday. The Economics award, created more recently, closes the series next Monday.

The Nobel Peace Prize, the most prominent, has never been so difficult to predict, with catastrophes multiplying throughout the planet.

Dan Smith, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri), is leaning towards a “white year”, that is, not granting the prize, as has already happened 19 times in its entire history, the last of them in 1972, in the middle of the Vietnam War.

“Perhaps it is time to say: ‘Yes, many people work very hard, but without results and we need more people and world leaders to wake up and realize that we are in an extremely dangerous situation,’” he told AFP.