American scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian won the 2021 Nobel Prize for Medicine on Monday for discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch which the award-giving body said could pave the way for new pain-killers.

Their findings “have allowed us to understand how heat, cold and mechanical force can initiate the nerve impulses that allow us to perceive and adapt to the world around us,” the Nobel Assembly at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute said.

“This knowledge is being used to develop treatments for a wide range of disease conditions, including chronic pain.”

The breakthrough discoveries, achieved independently of one another, had launched intense research activities that had led to “a rapid increase in our understanding of how our nervous system senses heat, cold and mechanical stimuli”, it said. The more than century-old prize is worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.15 million).

The Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, shared in equal parts this year by the two laureates, often lives in the shadow of the Nobels for literature and peace, and their sometimes more widely known recipients. But medicine has been thrust into the spotlight by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The 2021 laureates were caught off guard, according to the committee.

“They were incredibly happy and as far as I could tell very surprised and a little bit shocked,” said Prof. Thomas Perlmann, secretary-general for the Nobel Assembly and the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine.

Patapoutian, who was born in 1967 to Armenian parents in Lebanon and moved to Los Angeles in his youth, is a professor at Scripps Research, La Jolla, California, having previously done research at the University of California, San Francisco, and California Institute of Technology.

He is credited for finding the celular mechanism and the underlying gene that translates a mechanical force on our skin into an electric nerve signal.

New York-born Julius, 65, is a professor at University of California, San Francisco, after earlier work at Columbia University, in New York.

His findings on the skin’s sense of temperature was based on how certain cells react to capsaicin, the molecule that makes chili peppers spicy by simulating a false sensation of heat.