Sept. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Three Americans, a Japanese researcher and a Briton won this year's Albert Lasker Medical Research Awards, considered one of the nation's most prestigious and sometimes called ``America's Nobels.''

Professors Victor Ambros of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, David Baulcombe of the U.K.'s University of Cambridge and Harvard University's Gary Ruvkun received the award for basic medical research for their work with ribonucleic acid, or RNA, which controls gene function, the foundation said in a statement.

Akira Endo, director of Biopharm Research Laboratories Inc. in Tokyo, was given the Lasker-DeBakey Award for clinical medical research for helping develop statins, the drugs that aid in lowering dangerous cholesterol levels in treating coronary heart disease, the foundation said. Merck & Co.'s discovery of lovastatin was based on Endo's first research published in 1976, the foundation said.

The Lasker-Koshland Award went to Stanley Falkow, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University, for his 51 years of work that helped change the understanding of how microbes cause disease and the introduction of recombinant deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, techniques, the foundation said.

The awards will be presented at a luncheon on Sept. 26 at the Pierre Hotel in New York, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg will be the keynote speaker. Each of the awards carry a $300,000 prize and each recipient will receive a citation and Winged Victory of Samothrace statuette, the foundation said.

The Albert & Mary Lasker Foundation awards the prizes each year honoring research that aids in the prevention and treatment of disease.

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To contact the reporter on this story: Dan Hart in Washington at dahart@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: September 14, 2008 12:22 EDT