The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 277 No 7421 p414
7 October 2006

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RNA interference discovery wins US researchers the Nobel Prize for medicine

Two US scientists have been awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine for their discovery of RNA interference, a mechanism for silencing genes that could lead to the development of new treatments.

Andrew Fire of Stanford University School of Medicine and Craig Mello of the University of Massachusetts Medical School published their seminal work in Nature in 1998, which detailed how fragments of RNA can interfere with the expression of a particular disease-causing gene and effectively shut it down.

It is thought that discovery of this mechanism will lead to the ability to control genetics-based and other diseases. The process is already being used widely in scientific research as a method to study the functions of genes.