Professors Drew Weissman (left) and Katalin Kariko (EPA).

Two American scientists Katalin Kariko and Dr. Drew Weissman, whose long collaboration has led to the technology that was used to manufacture vaccines for COVID-19 and other afflictions, are this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Hungarian-born biochemist Karikó, 68, spent nearly a decade at BioNTech, the German pharmaceutical firm that collaborated with drug giant Pfizer to produce the pandemic’s first vaccine against the virus that causes COVID-19.

While Physician-scientist Weissman, 64, is a professor of vaccine research at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine.

Their work has armed scientists and drug companies with the means to turn the body’s cells into manufacturers of its own medicine.

“This year’s Nobel Prize recognizes their basic science discovery that fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with the immune system and had a major impact on society during the recent pandemic,” Rickard Sandberg, a member of the Nobel Assembly, said, according to LA Times.

Sandberg noted that mRNA vaccines, together with other COVID-19 shots, “have been administered over 13 billion times.”

Though mRNA rose to public prominence for its use in COVID-19 vaccines, the technology is expected to become a major basis for flu vaccines, allowing shorter lead times and more accurate matching between circulating influenza strains and yearly shots.

Beyond that, it could play a key role in treating sickle-cell disease and shows promise for the autoimmune disorder multiple sclerosis.

Its potential use in treating cancers is also opening new avenues for arming the immune system against malignancy.

HIV could be the next target. Three new experimental vaccines to protect against HIV infection, all based on an mRNA design similar to that used in the COVID-19 jab, are now undergoing early human clinical trials.

The techniques pioneered by Karikó and Weissman have allowed scientists to nimbly customize the proteins targeted by vaccines, a key for thwarting shape-shifting viruses like the coronavirus and HIV.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.