
Ustekinumab? Ixabepilone? RimabotulinumtoxinB?
Weird words, indeed, but (even more weirdly) you can probably guess that these are medications. We’ve become accustomed to the unpronounceable alphabetic mishmashes that name our pills. Who concocts these words, and how do they do it?
The process is too labyrinthine for me to explain, or even to understand after looking it up. Suffice it to say, the United States Adopted Names Program attaches a generic name to new drugs. According to the AMA Journal of Ethics, “Pharmaceutical names are assigned according to a scheme in which specific syllables in the drug name (called stems) convey information about the chemical structure, action, or indication of the drug. The name also includes a prefix that is distinct from other drug names and that is euphonious, memorable, and acceptable to the sponsoring pharmaceutical firm.”
I especially love the “euphonious.” (Whose Greek roots, by the way, mean “sweet-sounding.”)
In short, drugs end up with three names: a generic (non-proprietary) name (acetaminophen), a brand name (Tylenol) , and a chemical name. According to Wikipedia, “The brand name Tylenol and the United States Adopted Name acetaminophen were generated by McNeil (Laboratories) from the chemical name of the drug, N-acetyl–para-aminophenol (APAP).”
Sinemet, for another example, a brand-name Parkinson’s drug, combines two roots: sine, meaning “without” in Latin, and emetic, from Greek (and then Latin), meaning “to vomit.” Sinemet doesn’t make you vomit! The drug combines levodopa, a dopamine replacement, which causes nausea, with carbidopa, which inhibits nausea by preventing the creation of dopamine outside of the brain. Sinemet’s generic name is carbidopa-levodopa. Its scientific name may or may not be something like (2S)-2-amino-3-(3,4-dihydroxyphenyl)propanoic acid;3-(3,4-dihydroxyphenyl)-2-hydrazinyl-2-methylpropanoic acid.
A cholesterol drug, Lipitor, goes by the generic name atorvastatin. The prefix lipi- derives from lipids, referring to cholesterol compounds, and the suffix –tor- comes from the second syllable in atorvastatin, which apparently comes from a Spanish word meaning “to clog.” Statin comes from the Latin verb stare, meaning “to stand” or “to stop,” as in status, solstice (when the sun “stops”), and stasis. The drug stops the clogging.
Because it’s hard not to get lost in the weeds and because I have probably already butchered much of the science, I’ll stop. Feel free to correct me, and to share some of your own favorite medicinal nomenclature.
In closing, I recommend you check out this website, wherein a pharmacist shares some delightful customer mispronunciations of drug names. X and X, anyone?
*See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis