Congratulations to alums Victor Ambros ’75 (VII), PhD ’79 (VII) and Gary Ruvkun for winning the 2024 Nobel Prize in the category of Physiology or Medicine! They won the award jointly "for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation."
Koch Institute predecessor the MIT Center for Cancer Research opened fifty years ago in 1974, just as Ambros was finishing his undergraduate degree in biology and beginning his graduate work in the laboratory of founding faculty member David Baltimore. In the 1980s, Ruvkun joined Ambros at MIT, both working as postdocs in the laboratory of H. Robert Horvitz, a David H. Koch Professor of Biology; both mentors are themselves Nobel laureates, in 1975 and 2002, respectively.
Building on their time in the Horvitz lab, Ambros and Ruvkun's work laid the foundation for revolutionary insights into gene regulation, culminating in their Nobel Prize recognition.
"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," the Nobel committee said in its announcement today.