CALL    Volume    OpInt  Last
15.00    1,755    5,074   $5.40
17.50    14,991    7,596  $4.50
20.00    8,065    2,863  $3.70
22.50    2,375    158     $3.00
PUT$    Volume     OpInt  Last
10.00    6,610    541     $1.85
12.50    1,745    1,101  $2.70
15.00    3,521    2,136  $4.00

We’ll save on the technical jargon, but the closest speculative volatility bet being long the closest CALL and PUT effectively puts this stock having to go above $27.00 or below $5.50… The combined premiums are roughly $9.50, up almost $5.50 from when we looked ta this last week.  Keep in mind that those are major price changes from what was seen last week and those spreads should compress over the coming days…. barring any real new news.

Joe Kunkle of OptionsHawk.com pointed this one out last week and gave a brief heads-up alert on this one again.

Keep in mind that there is a huge discrepancy over analyst price targets as this is a battleground stock with many bears and many bulls on both sides of the fence.  To show just how active the bets are for and against this one…. it had 6.425 million shares listed in the short interest based upon the settlement date of January 15, 2010.

The company announced this morning that the FDA Pulmonary-Allergy Drugs Advisory Committee (PADAC) is scheduled to discuss the company’s New Drug Application (NDA) for pirfenidone on March 9, 2010.

This covers InterMune’s investigational drug candidate for the treatment of patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a uniformly fatal disease that affects about 100,000 Americans.  More than 30,000 new cases are diagnosed annually.  The company even noted that this has a higher mortality rate than colorectal cancer, breast cancer or prostate cancer, but noted that there are currently no approved medicines to treat IPF.

JON C. OGG