Ever Wonder How Drugs Get Their Names?

Naming medications is not a simple process. It's a collaborative, conscientious effort, involving multiple stakeholders and hurdles. Pfizer gives a peek behind the curtain and considers the naming process to be both an art and a science.

Just as all potential drugs go through rigorous safety assessments during their development, so do their names. That’s why a single name for a drug candidate can take years to get approval from regulatory authorities, in an entirely separate process from the approval of the drug, itself. The reason is simple: if a medication’s name is similar to another medication — either by the way it sounds or how it looks when written — the wrong product could get into a patient’s hands and potentially cause harm.

“The health authorities are constantly doing more to ensure the names they accept are safe to coexist with other pharmaceutical products,” says Michael Quinlan, who is a Senior Manager, Trademark Development, Market Research Insights, within the Global Commercial Analytics group with Pfizer. “We have hurdles that no other industry has because we put these inventions into our bodies.”

Specifically, every name must be distinct enough from other drug names to avoid confusion among patients, pharmacists and healthcare providers. That’s no easy feat, considering there are more than 20,000 prescription drug products approved for marketing in the U.S.1And it explains why some medication names can feel so alien to the words we’re used to.

It starts with a compound

When scientists discover a substance that holds promise to become a potential drug, they label the compound with a series of letters and numbers, which are then registered in an internal database for drug discovery.

Pfizer, for example, labels its compounds with the letter PF, for Pfizer, followed by up to 10 numbers: eight numbers are for the compound, followed by two additional numbers that represent the salt form of the compound if applicable so it might look PF-04965842-01. In the past, Pfizer’s compounds included just six digits. But over the years, after all eligible number combinations were exhausted, two additional numbers were added.

If the compound continues to show promise during early experiments and is advanced into clinical trials, and there are plans for potential commercialization as an approved innovative product, two distinct naming processes then begin: one for the potential drug's generic name, and one for its brand name.

How drugs get their generic names

When scientists discover that a potential drug that holds promise, the processes of developing the generic name and brand name begins. The United States Adopted Names (USAN) Council works in coordination with the World Health Organization's International Nonproprietary Names (INN) Programme to ensure global consistency. The generic name will allow the drug to be universally known, so that if a person is traveling abroad and needs a particular medication, they can inquire about the one they use back home and access it by the same name.

Generic drug names have two parts: a prefix and a suffix. The suffix acts as a scientific family name to describe the way the drug works in the body, while the prefix is often chosen to reflect the drug’s chemical structure or therapeutic class, as well as distinguishes the drug from other medications, and may impart a mood or a feeling. “We look for syllables that obviously are different from other existing generic names and that are pleasant enough in their tonality or appearance, so it doesn’t become overly complex to try to pronounce the generic name,” says Quinlan.

This article was published on https://www.pfizer.com/stories