Nobel Prizes awarded for microRNA discovery and AI breakthroughs

Nobel Prizes have been awarded to researchers who advanced understanding of microRNA, protein structure, and artificial neural networks.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine has been awarded jointly to Professor Victor Ambros, University of Massachusetts Medical School, and Professor Gary Ruvkun, Harvard Medical School, for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation.

Professor Ambros described microRNA to to Reuters as a 'communication network amongst genes that enables the cells in our bodies to generate all kinds of different complex structures and functions'.

Professors Ambros and Ruvkun started their work together as postdoctoral fellows studying mutant strains of the roundworm, C. elegans. After their postdoctoral research, they continued their work concurrently, and comparing their results, made the breakthrough discovery of a microRNA molecule that was involved in blocking protein production by binding to the complementary sequence of the protein's mRNA.

This finding was initially thought to be interesting in relation to C. elegans but not relevant to humans. This changed, however, when Ruvkun's research group subsequently discovered another microRNA encoded by the let-7 gene.

More than 1000 genes for microRNAs in humans have since been discovered. Gene regulation by microRNA has allowed the evolution of complex organisms, and abnormal regulation by microRNAs can contribute to severe forms of cancer as well as congenital hearing loss, eye and skeletal disorders.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded half to Professor David Baker, University of Washington, for computational protein design, and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, Google DeepMind, for protein structure prediction.

Professor Baker's research succeeded in using the 20 amino acids that usually make up proteins to build a completely new protein unlike any other. His research group has continued to use these building blocks to make multiple protein creations, many of which have been applied to pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors.

'We glimpsed at the beginning that it might be possible to create a whole new world of proteins that address a lot of the problems faced by humans in the 21st century,' Professor Baker told the Guardian. 'Now it's becoming possible.'

The other winners of this award, Hassabis and Jumper, announced the development of AlphaFold in 2020 (see BioNews 1105). This AI model has been able to predict the structure of more than 200 million proteins – almost all of the proteins that have ever been identified.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Professor John Hopfield, professor emeritus at Princeton University, and Professor Geoffrey Hinton, professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, Canada, for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.

The artificial intelligence technologies made possible by Professors Hopfield and Hinton have wide-ranging applications, which have recently included predicting male infertility (see BioNews 1250), selecting IVF embryos (see BioNews 1253) and identifying disease risk (see BioNews 1256).