Victor Ambros on the team effort behind his Nobel-prize winning discovery of microRNA – podcast
Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were awarded the 2024 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for their discovery of microRNA, tiny biological molecules that tell the cells in our body what kind of cell to be by turning on and off certain genes.
In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to Ambros about the discovery that led to his Nobel prize and find out what he’s researching now. And we hear about how a deeper understanding of microRNA is opening up new avenues for potential treatment of cancers and other diseases.
Today, Ambros is a professor of molecular medicine and the Silverman Chair in Natural Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School in the US. But the research that won him a Nobel prize was published more than 30 years ago in 1993, when he had just established his own research lab at Harvard University.
Ambros was trying to understand the way cells get the right instructions from DNA during their development. To do this, he was studying mutations in an experimental organism: a small worm called C. elegans.
We were studying some mutations and that affected C. elegans’ development in interesting ways – but we were not looking for the involvement of any sort of unexpected kind of molecular mechanisms.
Ambros’s wife, Rosalind Lee, and another member of the lab team, Rhonda Feinbaum, had spent a couple of years trying to understand the genetic process behind the mutation in a labour-intensive search. What they eventually discovered was a microRNA, a new dimension to gene regulation – the process through which genes are turned on and off in certain cells. As Ambros put it:
You can say they’re really the heroes behind this, and our job – mine and Gary’s – is to stand in as representatives of the whole enterprise of science, which is so dependent upon teams, collaborations, brainstorming among multiple people, communications of ideas and crucial data … All this is part of the process that underlies successful science like this.
MicroRNA’s role in cancer
Thanks to the discoveries of Ambros and Ruvkun back in the 1990s, medical researchers all over the world are looking at how microRNA affects the development of human diseases. One such researcher is Justin Stebbing, a professor of biomedical sciences at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK. He explained:
MicroRNAs, like many processes, can go wrong and they’ve been implicated in diseases as diverse as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s to cancer and kidney failure.
Stebbing said that in cancer, microRNA has been found to turn off tumour suppressor genes, effectively allowing cancers to spread. But microRNA can also be useful in understanding cancer, and in potential treatments:
We can work out the right treatments for people based on what we call a microRNA signature. We can understand prognosis, which means how severe people’s cancers are, but we can also try and harness them for treatments to make people better.
To find out more about the discovery of microRNA and what research is being done on it today, listen to the full episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, which includes an introduction from Vivian Lam, associate health and biomedicine editor at The Conversation in the US.
You can read an edited transcript of the interview with Victor Ambros on The Conversation or a full transcript of the episode on Apple Podcasts.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced by Katie Flood, Gemma Ware and Mend Mariwany. Sound design was by Michelle Macklem, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.
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Victor Ambros's laboratory’s research has been funded (since 1985) and is currently funded by the US National Institutes of Heath. Justin Stebbing does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.