2 US scientists win Nobel medicine prize for microRNA discovery

STOCKHOLM (Kyodo) — U.S. scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun won this year’s Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine on Monday for their discovery of the microRNA, which plays a crucial role in gene regulation, the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute said.

The work by Ambros and Ruvkun, professors at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and Harvard Medical School, respectively, on the new class of RNA molecules reveals how gene activity is regulated, unveiling how cells select a specific set of instructions depending on their function.

“MicroRNAs are proving to be fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function,” the assembly said, hailing the discovery as “groundbreaking.”

“If gene regulation goes awry, it can lead to serious diseases such as cancer, diabetes, or autoimmunity. Therefore, understanding the regulation of gene activity has been an important goal for many decades,” it said in a press release.

Ambors, 70, and Ruvkun, 72, made the discovery through the study of small roundworms, with the assembly noting that the mechanism “enabled the evolution of increasingly complex organisms.”