Shares in the South San Francisco biopharmaceutical company Anesiva Inc. rose more than 6 percent Friday after it said U.S. drug regulators had approved its treatment to prevent pain in children about to undergo procedures such as drawing blood or inserting intravenous lines.

The product, Zingo, delivers a measured dose of the painkiller lidocaine into the skin without the use of a needle. The drug, in powdered form, is propelled into the outer skin layer by a puff of helium gas from a disposable device that looks something like a giant marker pen.

The lidocaine powder dissolves in the skin, anesthetizing the site within minutes, the company said. Zingo will compete with products that take 20 minutes or more to numb the skin, said Anesiva chief executive John McLaughlin. The lag time can be a practical problem for busy doctors and nurses who must wait for the drug to take effect before drawing blood or inserting an IV line, he said. Often they forgo the use of a painkiller, McLaughlin said.

Dr. Russell Reiff, a pediatrician at Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco, said pain control should always be considered in the treatment of children. Reiff said Anesiva may have provided a useful option for doctors. But he said the product will be weighed against other alternatives. And the circumstances when Zingo might be used could be limited.

Doctors are most likely to use painkillers for children with serious conditions who need repeated blood tests and other procedures that tap into veins. Often a parent can apply a painkiller such as EMLA, a lidocaine-containing cream, an hour or so before a scheduled procedure so that practitioners need not wait for it to take effect, he said.

For some children, the addition of another step such as a Zingo treatment might prolong the fear and anxiety associated with needles. And doctors will want to be sure the pressure injection itself isn’t painful, Reiff said.

Patients will hear a sound like a balloon popping when Zingo delivers the medicine, a package insert for the drug advises. The most common side effects of Zingo were redness, red dots on the skin and swelling, Anesiva reported. “It’s painless,” said McLaughlin. “You feel a puff of air.”

The Food and Drug Administration approved Zingo for use in children ages 3 to 18. Anesiva is finishing a trial in adults and expects to seek FDA approval in that population. The company estimates that a total of 400 million procedures accessing veins take place in the United States every year, and more than 18 million are performed on children. McLaughlin said revenues from Zingo could reach $150 million to $200 million a year. But the company has not said when it expects sales to peak. In a research note, Lazard Capital Markets analyst Megan Murphy estimated sales of $67 million by 2013. Anesiva is a banking client of Lazard.

Zingo is the first approved product for Anesiva, which was formed in 2005 through the merger of Corgentech of South San Francisco and the private New Jersey company AlgoRx Pharmaceuticals. Corgentech, which had suffered the failure of its lead drug candidate, devoted its resources to the development of AlgoRx’s experimental pain medications.

Shares in Anesiva gained 33 cents or 6.36 percent Friday to close at $5.52.

E-mail Bernadette Tansey at btansey@sfchronicle.com.

BANGKOK, June 12 (UPI) — Thailand is leading the way for Southeast Asia in a quest to move toward nuclear power to meet rising energy demand.

While many countries have talked about building nuclear plants, even making initial contacts with the International Atomic Energy Agency, Thai authorities say two nuclear plants will come online by 2021. Each will pump 2,000 megawatts, The Star Online reports.

“Thailand cannot depend too much on natural gas because the gas fields in the Gulf of Thailand will run out very soon,” Energy Minister Piyavasti Amranand said. “Coal is cheap but the environmental costs are unquantifiable.”

Thailand has hired six experts for a planning study, World Nuclear News reports.

“The country made a big mistake 15 years ago scrapping plans to build a nuclear power plant because of opposition,” he said.

The Star reports the new plants would double the country’s generating capacity.

NEW YORK: IBM plans to mount its most ambitious challenge in years to Microsofts dominance of personal computer software, by offering free programs for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations.

The company was scheduled to announce the desktop software, called IBM Lotus Symphony, at an event here Tuesday. The programs will be available as free downloads from the IBM Web site.

IBMs Lotus-branded proprietary programs already compete with Microsoft products for e-mail, messaging and work group collaboration. But the Symphony software is a free alternative to Microsofts mainstay Office programs - Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The Office business is huge and lucrative for Microsoft, second only to its Windows operating system as a profit maker.

In the 1990s, International Business Machines failed as it competed head-on with Microsoft in personal computer software with its OS/2 operating system and its SmartSuite office productivity programs.

IBM is taking a different approach this time. Its offerings are versions of open-source software developed in a consortium called OpenOffice.org. The original code traces its origins to a German company, Star Division, that Sun Microsystems bought in 1999. Sun later made the desktop software, now called StarOffice, an open-source project, in which work and code are freely shared.

IBM engineers have been working with OpenOffice technology for some time. But last week, IBM declared that it was formally joining the open-source group.

OpenOffice.org has long been a source of free office productivity software, and the open-source alternative has not yet made much progress against Microsofts Office. But IBM, analysts note, has such reach and stature with corporate customers that its endorsement could be significant.

“IBM is jumping in with products that are backed by IBM, with the IBM brand and IBM service,” said Melissa Webster of the research firm IDC. “This is a major boost for open source on the desktop.”

IBM executives compare the move with the push the company gave Linux, the open-source operating system, with corporate data centers.