Gary Ruvkun, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and an investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital, has received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of microRNAs, a class of tiny RNA molecules that regulate the activities of genes in plants and animals, including humans.

A pair of Massachusetts professors won a Nobel Prize for discovering microRNA, which could lead to new ways of treating cancer.

In the late 1980s, Ambros and Ruvkun were postdoctoral researchers in the laboratory of Robert Horvitz, who received the Nobel Prize in 2002 with Sydney Brenner and John Sulston. In Horvitz's laboratory, they studied the relatively inconspicuous, 1-mm long roundworm C elegans.