Washington - When Diana Hind developed shingles, she could not sleep or sit, and sometimes she could not even bear to put clothes on.
As with tens of thousands of other victims, the virus made her nerve cells hypersensitive. And the condition, caused by an incurable herpes virus, did not go away.
Luckily for Hind, her frantic husband was a retired pharmacist and head of a large healthcare products company. He used his laboratory expertise and a little plastic cling wrap from the kitchen to invent a soothing patch that went on sale on Wednesday.
"There wasn't anything they could do for the pain," her husband, Harry Hind, said in a telephone interview from his home in Los Altos, California.
"The only thing that seemed to help her was the doctors would inject, locally, lidocaine over the site. That seemed to give her about six hours of relief from the pain."
Lidocaine, acting as an anaesthetic, would numb the area.
"You can't keep doing that all the time," said Hind, who co-founded healthcare products company Barnes-Hind.
"I felt we could accomplish the same thing by delivering the lidocaine into the area transdermally. It would go through her skin and cause the same effect."
Hind came up with a treatment that mysteriously worked to ease her pain for days, in a way far superior to the anaesthetic effects of the drug.
Shingles is a second eruption of chicken pox, a common childhood infection caused by one of the same family of herpes viruses responsible for cold sores. As with all herpes viruses, it hunkers down in cells, usually nerve cells, for life.
It re-erupts when the immune system wears down. In younger adults the body usually recovers quickly. But in older patients it can persist and make the nerves hypersensitive, causing them to read the simplest touch as agonising.
Diana Hind, now 81, developed shingles in 1989. Harry Hind, now 83, went to his company's laboratories and cooked up a lotion containing lidocaine.
"I came back that evening and applied the lotion to Diana's back area," he said. "To keep a reservoir of drug available to the skin, I made up a rather viscous solution and covered it with Saran Wrap and taped it down."
They left it on overnight.
"I told Diana, 'now in about three to four hours it will come back again'," Hind recalled. "The pain didn't come back for two weeks."
The mystified couple went to the pain centre at the University of California San Francisco.
Tests on 15 other patients with the pain, known as post-herpetic neuralgia, showed the lotion-wrap treatment worked for most of them, although the effects varied.
"Some patients got two days, some patients got eight hours, but it was a prolonged effect," Hind said.
He and the UCSF team published their findings and teamed up with transdermal patch manufacturer Teikoku Seiyaku of Japan and product marketers Endo Pharmaceuticals of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, to develop a hand-sized patch.
Called Lidoderm, it received Food and Drug Administration approval in June and went on the market on Wednesday.
Hind said instead of numbing the nerve cells, the patch delivers a small but steady amount of drug, de-sensitizing cells so that they do not interpret every touch as severe pain. "You can touch the area and it doesn't overreact," he said.
About 30 percent of patients do not respond to the patch, he said, perhaps because their nerve damage is too deep. - Reuters