My, How You've Grown

In the fourth grade, Angelo Tufano was so short he looked like a kindergartner, and he was miserable. "I was picked on a lot. Other kids called me 'midget' and 'shrimp,"' says Angelo, now an 18-year-old student at Columbia College in Chicago. "I used to cry." His mother, Carmela, persuaded an endocrinologist to prescribe a growth hormone, even though tests showed he didn't qualify for a prescription. Eventually she talked her insurance company into dropping the monthly co-pay for the drug from $700 a month to $5. Now Angelo stands at 5-foot-9 -- a full 10 inches taller than his doctors predicted he'd be without the drug. "I was worried society wouldn't accept him," Carmela says. "As a parent, you do what you have to do."

Parents such as Tufano are suddenly facing a plethora of ways to stack inches onto their height-challenged children. In June, Genentech Inc. (DNA ) quietly won approval from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration to expand the market for its growth hormone, Nutropin, which was approved in the early 1990s to treat children whose bodies don't produce adequate amounts. Now Genentech can also market Nutropin to children, like Angelo, with idiopathic short stature (ISS), meaning they're short for no obvious medical reason. And on Dec. 12, the FDA could approve iPlex from Insmed Inc. (INSM ) in Glen Allen, Va. -- the second entry this year in an entirely new class of drugs to treat children whose bodies produce growth hormone but can't benefit from it.