Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine Is Awarded to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun

The prize was awarded for their discovery of microRNA, which helps determine how cells develop and function.

Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for the discovery of microRNA, which plays a crucial role in determining how organisms develop and function — and how they sometimes malfunction.

MicroRNA are a class of tiny RNA molecules, Nobel Prize officials said. The discovery revealed a new principle of gene regulation that is crucial for multicellular organisms, including humans.

Gene regulation determines differences between types of cells, and if it goes off track it can lead to diseases such as cancer, diabetes or autoimmunity, the Nobel Committee said. Researchers now know that the human genome provides instructions for over 1,000 forms of microRNA, which are important to the development and function of organisms.

“That opened up a whole new understanding of how diseases happen, which means that we have new possibilities for reversing them,” said Jon Lorsch, director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

Treatments based on microRNAs are in clinical trials for heart disease, cancer and neurodegenerative diseases.

Who are the winners?

Dr. Ambros is from Hanover, N.H., and is the Silverman professor of natural science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Mass. Dr. Ruvkun, from Berkeley, Calif., is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and a member of the Mass General Research Institute.

The pair began studying gene regulation while they were postdoctoral fellows at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the lab of H. Robert Horvitz, who won his own Nobel Prize in 2002.

They continued collaborating after they established their own laboratories and received the 2008 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (along with David C. Baulcombe of the University of Cambridge), which often precedes Nobel Prizes, for their work on the “unanticipated world of tiny RNAs.”

Dr. Ruvkun studied biophysics at the University of California, Berkeley and finished his Ph.D. at Harvard University. Dr. Ambros received his undergraduate and graduate degree from M.I.T.

Why did they receive the prize?

The RNA molecule, or ribonucleic acid, is often explained to high school biology students as carrying instructions from DNA to cells, enabling the creation of proteins.

Dr. Ambros and Dr. Ruvkun’s findings suggested that this process, so fundamental that it is often referred to as the “central dogma of molecular biology,” might be more complex.

Their work centered on microRNA, which, as the name suggests, is much shorter than its RNA counterpart. While typical RNA might have hundreds or thousands of basic building blocks, microRNA might only have dozens.

Their work involved a millimeter-size roundworm, C. elegans, which scientists often use in basic research because it has many types of cells packed into a simple anatomy.

Dr. Lorsch, who was a graduate student working one floor above Dr. Ruvkun’s lab, saw the discovery unfold in real time.

Dr. Ruvkun walked up one flight of stairs to Dr. Lorsch’s lab, as he often did to bounce ideas off graduate students, and held up a picture of the novel molecule, microRNA, attached to a larger strand of RNA.

“What do you think’s going on here?” he asked.

The graduate students, who Dr. Lorsch said were usually “of zero help to him” shrugged their shoulders and Dr. Ruvkun went back downstairs with his finding.

But what the two Nobel laureates eventually showed was that microRNA act as “controllers” of the process that produces proteins, telling the larger RNA when to slow down or stop.

This is important because too much or too little of a given protein can result in a wide range of diseases, like cancer or osteoporosis. Mutations in the genes that have instructions for microRNA have been linked to congenital hearing loss and eye and skeletal disorders, Nobel Prize officials said.

The discovery, originally described in 1993 in two separate papers published the journal Cell, was first met with “almost deafening silence,” the Nobel committee wrote, because many scientists believed that this process to be unique to the worm that Dr. Ambros and Dr. Ruvkun studied, not humans or other more complicated animals.

However, researchers have since found thousands of forms of microRNA in humans and other animals, confirming that this new principle of gene regulation is “essential for all complex life forms,” Nobel Prize officials said.

This is a developing news story that will be updated.

Who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2023?

Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman recognized work that led to the development of potent Covid vaccines — that were administered to billions around the world.

When will the other Nobel Prizes be announced?

The prize for physiology or medicine is the first of six Nobel Prizes that will be awarded this year. Each award recognizes groundbreaking contributions by an individual or organization in a specific field.

• The Nobel Prize in Physics will be awarded on Tuesday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Last year, Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier shared the prize for work that let scientists capture the motions of subatomic particles moving at impossible speeds.
• The Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be awarded on Wednesday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Last year, the prize went to Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov for discovering and developing quantum dots that are expected to lead to advances in electronics, solar cells and encrypted quantum information.
• The Nobel Prize in Literature will be awarded on Thursday by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. Last year, Jon Fosse of Norway was honored for plays and prose that gave “voice to the unsayable.”
• The Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded on Friday by the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo. Last year, Narges Mohammadi, an activist in Iran, was recognized “for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all.” Ms. Mohammadi is serving a 10-year sentence in an Iranian prison where her attorneys have raised concerns about her well-being.
• Next week, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be awarded on Monday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Last year, Claudia Goldin was awarded for her research uncovering the reasons for gender gaps in labor force participation and earnings.

All of the prize announcements are streamed live by the Nobel Prize organization.