On Oct. 7, 2024, The Nobel Foundation announced that Victor Ambros from Harvard University and Gary Ruvkun from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine ‘for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation.‘

Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun discovered microRNA, a new class of tiny RNA molecules that 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. It is now known that the human genome codes for over one thousand microRNAs. Their surprising discovery revealed an entirely new dimension to gene regulation. MicroRNAs are proving to be fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function.