Stay with us, though, for the unusual history and strikingly wide array of uses already found for rapamycin (which also goes by the name sirolimus).

The name comes from Rapa Nui, the Polynesian name for Easter Island. Scientists first isolated the compound from bacteria from the island’s soil; the bacteria apparently secrete it to fend off bacterial and fungal rivals, notes ScienceNOW.

Today, it’s used to reduce the risk of rejection for organ transplant recipients (Wyeth sells it under the brand-name Rappamune). It’s also used in some drug-coated stents (including J&J’s coated Cypher stent).

What’s more, Wyeth’s kidney cancer drug Torisel (generic name: tensirolimus) is closely related to rapamycin, and Novartis has been working on a similar drug.

If you really want to geek out on rapamycin, read this explainer from Novartis on mTOR (mammalian target of rapamycin), the pathway that’s at the heart of how these drugs work.

Easter Island photo by Phillie Casablanca via Flickr

M. Jodi Rell, the state’s Republican governor, said the plan for universal coverage would cost $1 billion a year — and pointed out that the state faces a projected $8.85 billion deficit over the next two fiscal years, the Hartford Courant reports.

One of the bills would have opened up the state’s insurance pool to municipalities, small businesses and nonprofit agencies. The other would have aimed to create a public insurance pool that anyone could join.

Both bills passed the state’s Legislature (where the Dems are in the majority) by margins that would wide enough to override the veto — if they kept all of their supporters onboard. It’s unclear whether that will happen, the Courant says.

Connecticut doesn’t have to look far to find an example of the high costs of expanding health insurance; as we noted recently, Massachusetts is making cuts in order to pay for its universal health plan.

If you’re Johnson & Johnson, you take out full-page ads in national newspapers touting Tylenol as “the safest brand of pain reliever you can choose.” But you also point out that If “you take more than the recommended dose … you can cause serious liver injury.”

As this morning’s WSJ notes in an analysis of J&J’s response, the company has long maintained a good reputation for crisis management — one forged a generation ago, when it aggressively responded to a 1982 incident in which Extra Strength Tylenol was laced with cyanide.

So far, the Obama-era FDA is taking a strict stance on over-the-counter drugs (witness the recent Zicam action), which suggests some kind of FDA action on acetaminophen (the active ingredient in Tylenol, as well as lots of other OTC drugs). That means J&J will have to continue to react — and, the WSJ points, the company will have to strike a balance between marketing the Tylenol’s safety and acknowledging regulators’ concerns.

Acetaminophen Bonus: For more on the drug, see this week’s Health Journal column.

Photo: Associated Press

This seems like a natural enough narrative for the moment when Congress actually has to figure out how to restructure health insurance and — even tougher — how to pay for the trillion-dollar package. (See our post from yesterday on the dimming prospects for taxing high-end health benefits.)

Here are a few headlines that caught our eye this morning:

“Healthcare Overhaul Bill Stalls in Congress,” this morning’s Boston Globe says. The story quotes Democrat Max Baucus, perhaps the most important congressional figure in this debate, on the prospects for passing a Senate health bill by the August deadline: “I hope,” he said. “It’s a goal. We’ll see.” Republican Judd Gregg was blunt: “I don’t see any way it can make it to the floor by the August recess,” he said, according to the Globe.

“Discord on Health Care Dulls Luster Of New Pacts,” says the Washington Post’s headline. The story notes that Henry Waxman, a key House Dem, said yesterday that the House isn’t bound to abide by the recent high-profile deals struck between the Senate Finance Committee, the White House and the drug and insurance industries. Meanwhile, the WaPo added, some hospital leaders were raising internal objections to the $155 billion hospital cost-savings deal announced this week.

“Obama Budget Chief Says Health Bill ‘Not Enough’ to Fix System,” Bloomberg News tells us. That would be Peter Orszag, who yesterday said the House version of the health-reform bill “would perpetuate a system in which best practices are far from universal and costs are too high,” according to Bloomberg.

“Health-Care Overhaul Goals Prove Challenging,” says the WSJ. The story notes that the Congressoinal Budget Office — whose financial estimates of proposed bills are hugely important — keeps finding that health-reform bills fall short of the Dems’ key goals. Either they’re likely cost far more than the $1 trillion (over 10 years) everyone is aiming for, or they’re unlikely to result in the near-universal insurance coverage that’s also a Democratic goal.

Collins, 59 years old, served as director of the NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute from 1993 to 2008 and oversaw the international collaboration known as the Human Genome Project. That project, completed in 2003, determined the sequence of the three billion base pairs that make up human DNA.

Moreover, it spurred the field of genomics and the dream to personalize medicine for individuals based on their genes. His nomination is being applauded by organizations like the American Heart Association and Personalized Medicine Coalition, who laud his “landmark discoveries of disease genes.”

As head of the NIH, Collins would oversee nearly $40 billion a year in federal research funding. Earlier this year, Obama beefed up the research funding of the NIH by $10 billion.

Of course, Collins will have to deal with the issue of conflicts of interest in researchers who receive NIH funding. Zerhouni tackled that by banning NIH scientists from industry consulting, notes Dow Jones Newswires. He is also a devout Christian who doesn’t see a conflict between religion and science, says NPR.

“My administration is committed to promoting scientific integrity and pioneering scientific research and I am confident that Dr. Francis Collins will lead the NIH to achieve these goals,” Obama said in a statement.

Photo: Bloomberg

Today, the EU’s competition commissioner, in issuing a final report from the investigation, called for closer scrutiny and stricter regulation of the the pharmaceutical industry, particularly the practice known as “pay for delay“, where generic makers strike a deal with branded companies to delay entry of generic competition into the marketplace.

The report emphasizes that drug makers, difficulties in innovation and other factors like how the industry is regulated all contribute to generic delays. It calls for a single patent and litigation system across the EU as one way to improve the situation.

“When it comes to generic entry, every week and month of delay costs money to patients and taxpayers,” Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said in news conference, according to the New York Times. “We will not hesitate to apply the antitrust rules where such delays result from anti-competitive practices.”

Though the report itself doesn’t name any companies, the EU separately opened up antitrust investigations of at least two generics makers, Les Laboratoires Servier and Teva, according to Dow Jones Newswires and Bloomberg.

The EU report lays out its findings from the investigation of 219 compounds from 43 branded drug makers and 27 generic companies from 2000 to 2007. On average, it took more than seven months for generics to enter the market after the branded drug went off patent, which costs the individuals and health-care system a lot of money.

The investigation also found that the patent battle between branded and generic companies is intense. Between 2000 and 2007, there were at least 1,300 out-of-court disputes involving the 219 compounds, and 698 cases of patent litigation. Of the nearly 700 legal cases, 223 cases were settled — 149 by the courts — and the remaining cases were either still pending or withdrawn. The average length of each legal case was 2.8 years.

The premise for both of these concepts is when a living donor wants to give a kidney to someone they know but isn’t a biological match for them. Instead, they are matched to a recipient they don’t know. Ideally, another donor then provides his or her organ to the first recipient. These types of transactions are rare because they’re difficult to arrange, even with just one donor and one recipient.

So imagine an eight-way kidney transplant involving surgeries with 10 women and six men in four states over the course of three weeks. It’s thought to be the longest chain of kidney donations on record, according to the Washington Post.

Johns Hopkins Hospital, where most of the surgeries were performed, has been doing such domino transplants since 2001. It completed a six kidney-donation chain of transplants in February, notes the Baltimore Sun.

“At the end of the chain, that kidney still goes to someone in great need,” Robert Montgomery, the doctor who led the transplant team at Hopkins, told the Sun. “But along the way, you’re able to accomplish two, three, four, eight transplants. …These are all ways of trying to optimize the number of people who are able to receive life-saving transplants.”

Among the aims of the overhaul: to set up a federal “command system” that would respond to outbreaks and develop industry guidelines to help the government track contaminated products. The FDA and USDA are also setting new standards to reduce salmonella and E. coli infections, says the WSJ.

The New York Times describes many of the measures announced yesterday as “more aspirational than actual.”

But, improving food safety has been a goal of federal agencies for years, and the current system is widely criticized as fragmented. The division of labor between the 15 federal agencies that oversee food inspections is “complex and sometimes bizarre,” according to the Washington Post.

Image: iStockphoto

Sen. Chuck Grassley had talked up the proposal just last week. But the WSJ notes that other senators including Kent Conrad, he of the health co-op idea, say that a first-ever tax on such benefits is unpopular and would be difficult to explain to voters.

Though it’s not completely off the table, the Senate is considering a broader spate of options to help fund the huge price tag of reform, including “modestly” limiting the tax deductions for the wealthy, a proposal President Obama has raised repeatedly.

Just 30% of voters support a tax on benefits, according to a telephone poll conducted in late June, compared with 55% who support the idea of limiting tax deductions for families who make over $250,000 a year.

On the industry front, various stakeholders have agreed to cost-saving measures, the hospital association being the most recent to agree to cut costs. But, notes the New York Times, it isn’t clear if those savings will actually become reality, or what industry would get in return for their cooperation.

The new policy comes in an editorial in this week’s issue of JAMA. Many portions of the editorial are identical to an online editorial posted in March. In addition to modifying the policy on speaking publicly about conflict of interest-related complaints, the new version of the editorial omits some material in the previous version.

Gone are several paragraphs from the March editorial that attacked Jonathan Leo, a Tennessee researcher who says he was threatened by JAMA editors after publicly disclosing a conflict-of-interest problem he found with a JAMA study published last year. JAMA Editor in Chief Catherine DeAngelis called Leo a “nobody and a nothing” when asked about him by the Health Blog earlier this year. See the post here.

In the March editorial, the JAMA editors accused Leo of “a serious ethical breach of confidentiality” by writing publicly about the conflict of interest that was unreported in the study while JAMA editors were conducting an investigation. Leo says he decided to go public with the conflict-of-interest problem in the study after waiting months for JAMA editors to correct it themselves.

As for the new version of the editorial, Leo says he is “glad…that “they no longer maintain their allegations that I violated a confidentiality agreement and was guilty of an ethical breach.”

JAMA editors declined to comment.

Photo: Associated Press