Orshe

Another day, another stock-price jump.

First, the preliminaries: An advisory panel this afternoon recommended the FDA approve a lung drug developed by InterMune, with majorities of the outside experts saying the proposed treatment appeared effective and safe.

The FDA is expected to decide by early May whether to go along with the panel’s recommendation on pirfenidone, which is intended to treat patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. The FDA usually follows the lead of its advisory committees.

Last we heard of Fablyn, an experimental bone drug for the treatment of postmenopausal women, U.S. regulators were holding off on approval after FDA staff and outside reviewers raised concerns and Pfizer, the pill’s maker, was shopping it around to other companies.

Biotech research is the sexy thing these days in the drug business, but that kind of buzz isn’t worth much in Hollywood. With the movie Extraordinary Measures opening this weekend, though, biotech gets its glamour moment.

More people are waiting for organ transplants and dying on transplant waiting lists. So governments around the world are looking for new ways to encourage more people to be donors, and doctors are using organs that they might have rejected in the past.

Israel just launched a system where people who agree to be donors get higher priority if they ever need an organ; surgeons in Maryland recently transplanted kidneys from which they had excised tumors.

From the record-keeping department, some executive announcements from two big drug makers this week:

Today, Merck said it is naming Michael Rosenblatt to the new position of chief medical officer. Rosenblatt, a Harvard-trained endocrinologist, has been dean of Tufts University School of Medicine since 2003.

He had worked at Merck in the late 1980s, helping develop osteoporosis drug Fosamax. He had also been a professor and a faculty dean at Harvard Medical School.

As we’ve watched smoking bans spread around the world, we’ve never thought to ask ourselves what the bans mean for stage plays that call for actors to smoke. But it turns out this is a big issue in some places.

Here’s a YouTube video of a guy drinking what looks like a glass of greasy animal fat. Obviously, it’s rather nasty:

The video, courtesy of New York City’s health department, is part of a push to get people to cut back on sugary beverages. It went up yesterday, and it’s already drawn more than 65,000 views.

The American Beverage Association, a trade group, put out a statement that said in part:

Getting a CT scan exposes you to radiation, which raises your risk of cancer a tiny bit. Getting lots of CT scans over the course of a lifetime can raise your risk more. So as the number of scans done in this country has exploded in recent years, the cumulative risk patients face from scans has drawn more attention from doctors.

Levying a tax on sugary soft drinks — products many public health experts say are empty of nutrients and add unneeded calories to our diets — has been discussed as a way of helping pay for health reform and combating obesity.

Socialized health care in the U.K. isn’t so bad, write two U.K. academics in a piece published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

In fact, the authors say the British system has two major strengths that the U.S. can learn from: strong primary care and NICE, the agency that assesses and approves reimbursement for cost-effective treatments.