Medicine Nobel awarded for gene-regulating ‘microRNAs’

The Nobel prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to two geneticists who discovered microRNAs, a class of tiny RNA molecules that help to control how genes are expressed in multicelllular organisms.
Victor Ambros, who works at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester and Gary Ruvkun at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, share the prize pot of 11 million Swedish kroner (US$1.1 million), awarded by the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.
The discovery “has opened up a new field in gene regulation”, said Nobel committee member Olle Kämpe, an endocrinologist at the Karolinska Institute, at a press conference announcing the prize.
“Although there are no very clear applications available yet with microRNAs, understanding them, knowing that they exist, understanding their regulatory networks is always the first step,” said committee chair Gunilla Karlsson Hedestaman, an immunologist at the Karolinska Institute.