Chapter 1: What is the significance of drug names in the pharmaceutical industry?
This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Roman, what prescription drugs do you take? I don't know. Do you take Jurnavex? This is Sean Cole, everybody. He's an old friend of mine, a friend of the show.
Or Extensor? Do you take Extensor?
I don't think I want to discuss, you know, like... Or Zyaflex?
What is going on? Ask your doctor. Ask your doctor about Extenvi.
Ask your doctor about Nexplanon. Ask about Repatha.
Ask about Nucala.
Ask your doctor about Caplida. Oopsie.
Okay, Sean, why are we talking about this? So the reason I'm sitting here with you today can pretty much be boiled down to the Seinfeldian question, what is the deal with pharmaceutical brand names? It's like watching TV in the middle of the day can make you feel like you've had a partial stroke that scrambled half the words on the screen. Yeah.
Which is ironic, considering that that's probably what some of the drugs they're advertising are supposed to prevent. You can say that again, Kenan Thompson.
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Chapter 2: How do creative teams brainstorm drug names?
Is it simply wrongheaded on the part of the marketers?
I mean, those are a lot of questions, but do you have some answers for those questions?
Yes, I got to the bottom of it. And I'll just say underneath the noisiness of the names is not just a logic that you'd never guess is in operation. In a lot of cases, there's, I know how this is going to sound, an actual poetry going on that I never imagined and that I now want everybody else to be thinking about the next time they see one of those ads.
That's a big claim when you're talking about brand names of drugs. Okay. But just hear me out. We'll see what you think at the end. But just to start at the beginning. Hello, Scott. Yes, Sean. Hi, how are you? This is Scott Piergrossi, who is in practically every article you read about pharmaceutical brand names. And there's a reason for that.
He's the head of creative at the Brand Institute, which is kind of a clearinghouse. They help name more than 75 percent of the new drugs on the market in a given year. 75%?
One company?
Yep, at least according to them. 75% of both brand names and generic names, too, which are even longer and wilder sounding, as you know. They have a separate department for generics, or non-proprietary. They get upset when you say generics. Non-proprietary names. But we are focusing on the brand names, the Brand Institute names.
Can I also respectfully correct you and say it's just Brand Institute?
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yes. Lose the the. It's cleaner. That's right. That's right. Scott's been at Brand Institute for more than 20 years. And I just asked him to, you know, take me through the process from the beginning. Like, where do they even start naming a drug?
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Chapter 3: What role does poetry play in naming pharmaceuticals?
Yeah.
I'll take your word for it. Brand Institute has also started using an AI platform called Brandy. Cute. That's just helping out with the initial phase of the process. Scott says a lot of the work is still done by humans.
You might explore types of names like palindromes or anagrams. One of the more helpful exercises we do is we try to get the client to state, like if it's on the cover of Time magazine, for example, what would the headline say? And then we actually might even try to mold that expression into a name.
Hang on, so you would try to take that sentence?
Yeah, so let's say a drug alters your course in life. Altacourse.
I want a drug that does that, by the way. If I could take Altacourse, boy oh boy. Altacourse. Or... They could look at the drug and say, okay, what is the hopeful outcome of taking this thing?
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Chapter 4: How do regulatory guidelines influence drug naming?
And then explore that from a bunch of different angles. So, for example, sleep aids. They could say, okay, this is a drug that helps you stay asleep through the night, or this is a drug that leaves you feeling refreshed in the morning. Same section of the drugstore, two different ways of looking at it. So, for example, there's Lunesta. A drug that Scott's company named.
The reason Lunesta works is because of the lunar imagery. The suffix esta has an inference of restorative sleep. As in siesta.
Ah, okay. Very cool. See what they're doing there?
But really the lunar is what anchored it. So nighttime sleep. Within the category, you have Ambien. What is Ambien? It's A-M-B-N. Good morning. So that's the good morning. Then you have newer products like Belsamra. That's a beautiful night's sleep with Belsamra. Belsam is somnus, which is sleep in Latin.
Then there's other sources of little name building blocks.
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Chapter 5: What are the challenges of creating unique drug names?
They might grab a few letters from the generic name of the drug or the active ingredient. For example, bupropion hydrochloride. That's the active ingredient in the antidepressant Welbutrin. And then sometimes the name is derived from the science of how the drug works. Right.
A lot of cancer drugs are like that, Scott says, because the audience is really more the doctor than the patient in those cases.
So oftentimes we want to highlight what's unique about that product from a scientific standpoint because that'll resonate with oncologists. And about half of new cancer therapies are derived from the mechanism of action, so the science behind the drug.
That is what the drug is actually doing and to what part of you.
Right.
So there's this one drug called Imdeltra. It's I-M-D-E-L-L-T-R-A.
Imdeltra is a DLL3 immunotherapy. Well, of course.
I mean, everybody knows about that.
So the double L's and the tra suggesting three is so intentional to represent the mechanism of action of the product quite elegantly.
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Chapter 6: How do cultural references shape drug names?
And unlike Brand Institute, with its teams of 15 people or whatever, the places Arlene's worked, people tend to tackle projects on their own. And just to give you another picture of how drug names are invented, there's this one drug she was assigned back in 1992 that was for benign prostatic hyperplasia, enlarged prostate basically, which makes it difficult to pee.
In trying to figure out what to name this drug, Arlene ran a focus group with a bunch of urologists. And this one doctor in particular said something that stuck with her.
It was at the end of the group, and I asked the doctor, what's it like when the drug worked and the guy got well? And the doctor said, visualize a strong stream.
A strong stream of urine.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
So when I was home and I was writing the notes up, I thought to myself, well, a strong stream, that would be vigorous. And the first thing I could think of that was stream like that was Niagara.
No.
Yes.
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