Shingles, the painful recurrence among the elderly of the virus that caused chickenpox in their younger years might have finally found its match in a compound discovered by researchers in the University of Georgia nd Yale University. About 30 percent of elderly in the United States suffer from shingles and medical science currently has no specified treatment for it.

Shingles is a painful bistering rash that can cover large persons of the body. The resulting scarring and nerve pain can persist for months even after the blisters disappear. The culprit is the varicella-zoster virus (VZV), the same virus that caused a persons chickenpox outbreak as a child. The virus goes on a hiatus in the host body's nerve endings and usually waits until well past age 60 to re-emerge as shingles.

L-BHDA, the new anti-shingles compound has proven to be effective and Bukwang Pharmaceutical Company has been granted a license for preclinical investigations by teh University of Georgia Research Foundation and Yale University. L-BHDA is an invention by medicinal chemist Chung (David) Chu, Distinguished Research Professor of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Sciences at UGA and Yung-Chi (Tommy) Cheng, Henry Bronson Professor of Pharmacology at Yale University.

The Chu-Cheng partnership has already produced an extensive portfolio of antiviral compounds that target such diseases as HIV, shingles, hepatitis and cancers. Chu said that L-BHDA is more effective than existing anti-shingles agents which are only moderately effective.