The Health Blog’s occasional encounters with bears have prompted various modes of reflection. One thought that’s never crossed our mind: Why doesn’t that bear have osteoporosis?

But that’s just what Seth Donahue thought nearly a decade ago, when he saw a bear while hiking in California’s Sierra Nevada, according to WSJ’s Lab Journal. People’s bones become weaker if they are bedridden for just a few weeks, but bears hibernate for months on end without suffering from brittle bones when they wake up.

So Donahue, a biomedical engineer at Michigan Technological University sought out other researchers who were studying bears — some in the wild, some in captivity — and began to study what kept bear bones strong. He found what he believes to be their secret: a potent form of parathyroid hormone.

He’s even convinced industry that he may be on to something. Apjohn, a company founded by ex-Pharmacia and Upjohn employees (companies since absorbed by Pfizer), has partnered with Michigan Tech to commercialize the finding. For that project, they’ve created a company called Aursos, whose name comes from the Latin word for bears.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

If you’re fretting about drinking, you might be skipping red wine despite evidence that the grape squeezings may carry health benefits.

Some day, if all goes well in the lab, you may be able to take a pill instead. And Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, a pioneer of the approach, just reported results from an early study in diabetic patients. The company’s drug, code-named SRT501, is based on resveratrol — a chemical found in red wine.

The results look promising, reports the WSJ, though it’s very early days. Resveratrol, which we’ve written about here and here, appears to slow the aging process and modulates blood sugar and insulin by activating the sirtuin 1 enzyme.

The company said yesterday that a 28-day safety study showed the drug known as SRT501 was well-tolerated and safe for patients, with no serious adverse events recorded. The drug also showed a statistically significant improvement in an oral glucose tolerance test on day 28, but not in fasting plasma glucose levels.

There’s a long way to go before we’ll know whether SRT501 will actually be a safe and beneficial drug for diabetic patients, but it’s being watched carefully because it could be helpful for other diseases as well. It’s the first to work by acting on the genes that control the aging process, Peter Elliott, senior vice president of development at Sirtris, said in the release.

“We chose diabetes because it’s a big market, but the biology says the drug could work on any number of diseases,” David Sinclair, a professor at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of Sirtris, told the WSJ.

Red wine image by Gonzalo Viera Azpìroz via Flickr

An Arkansas neurosurgeon pleaded guilty yesterday to soliciting and accepting kickbacks from a medical device salesman, the Boston Globe reports.

Patrick Chan also agreed to cooperate with the government’s investigation into whether Blackstone Medical, which sells devices and implants used in back surgery, defrauded Medicaid and Medicare by paying illegal incentives to other doctors.

And Chan said he will pay $1.5 million to settle allegations against him in a so-called whistle-blower lawsuit, which alleges Blackstone and another company provided kickbacks in the form of “bogus consulting contracts, fake research studies, and gifts to Chan and doctors across the nation who agreed to use the companies’ devices in back surgeries,” according to the Globe.

Chan was accused of switching to Blackstone, which gave him a $25,000 consulting deal, after a competitor refused to pay him off. Blackstone was acquired in 2006 by Orthofix International, which has set aside $50 million to deal with possible settlements of allegations involving improper payments to doctors, according to the Globe.

This is just the latest case of alleged financial chicanery in the surgical device world. Last fall, several manufacturers of orthopedic implants listed their payments to docs online under settlements with the federal government.

With results from the Iowa caucuses coming tonight, two Big Pharma CEOs seemed unworried about how the drug industry will fare this election year.

Despite the uncertainties, Schering-Plough CEO Fred Hassan struck an upbeat tone when asked about politics at Morgan Stanley’s “Pharmaceutical CEOs Unplugged” conference. The drug industry, he said, is in “50% positive territory in terms of our favorable standing with the American public, and that has a big effect on the way politics develop.” (We were surprised by that figure and asked Schering-Plough for more information. No word yet.)

Both Hassan and Merck CEO Richard Clark, who also spoke at the conference, said the Medicare drug benefit has been successful. Hassan said, for instance, that efforts to give the government power to negotiate drug prices for the program have “died down.” That’s because of seniors’ high satisfaction with the program, he said.

Hassan also said the industry is doing a “more effective job at working both sides of the aisle.” For his part, Clark added that Merck has “always worked on a bipartisan basis with Republicans and Democrats.” Clark, who takes over as chairman of the trade group PhRMA this year, said he hopes the industry will be able to offer recommendations on health reform, especially around the uninsured.

For an indicator of that bipartisan spirit, take a look at drug industry contributions to the donkeys and elephants, as Dow Jones Newswires reminded us this morning.

Still, the public optimism from the CEOs today clashed with some of the chatter on the Health Blog about the presidential race. We couldn’t help but remember readers’ comments in defense of Big Pharma to this post about a proposal by John Edwards to replace patents with prizes for new drugs. Or a broadside from Hillary Clinton that we’d read in the New York Times on New Year’s day: “I’ve taken on the drug companies,” Clinton said. “I’ve taken on the health insurance companies; I’ve taken on the oil companies, and I intend to keep doing it.”

Update: Our curiosity piqued, we did find some recent data on how Americans view drug makers. Harris Interactive polled more than 2,500 adults in October and found that Big Pharma tied with Big Oil at 53% as the industry that respondents said is most in need of additional regulation. When asked which industries are “generally honest and trustworthy,” only 11% said pharmaceuticals fit the bill. Supermarkets topped the trustworthiness chart at 32%.

To celebrate 1 year anniversary of Manage Your Heartburn I created an overview of “How I cured my Heartburn” in a form of a short article so every visitor of this site could read it in 5 minutes and get a good overview on how I did it. Check it out here