Why do drugs/medicines have such difficult names?

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And what’s the creative process behind coming up with such names?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Drugs usually have three separate names; the brand name, the [INN name](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_nonproprietary_name) and [IUPAC name](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IUPAC_nomenclature_of_organic_chemistry) (which is more like a chemical formula than a name). You’re probably looking for one of the first two.

Brand names are “easy”; it can be pretty much whatever they want. However, pharma marketing people do their very best to come up with something that’s memorable and sounds like it’ll do the job. There’s a lot to it, and you’ll find plenty if you google about “deciding drug names” or something along those lines.

The INN names start with a unique part (decided on by a few regulatory agencies like the WHO and USAN), after which they’re very systematically built up. As an example from a [type of drugs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenclature_of_monoclonal_antibodies) I work a lot with and follow a particularly complicated scheme: the monoclonal antibody adalimumab has *ada-* as its unique part, *-lim-* to indicate it is immunomodulatory, *-u-* to indicate it’s of fully human origin, and the standard *-mab* suffix that any monoclonal gets.

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