Drug nomenclature

Drug nomenclature is the act of creating names for a drug or other pharmaceutical substance. Drugs, in the majority of circumstances, have 3 names: the chemical name, the International Nonproprietary Name (INN, also known as the generic or nonproprietary name), and the brand name. The generic name is constructed out of affixes that classify the drugs into different categories and also separate drugs within categories. A marketed drug might also have a company code or compound code.

Types
The chemical name is the scientific name, based on the molecular structure of the drug. These names are typically very long and too complex to be commonly used in referring to a drug. When a drug is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), it is given a generic name, or United States Adopted Name (USAN), the shorthand version of the chemical name. The pharmaceutical company then gives it a brand name, what the drug is sold as. For example, Lipitor is the brand name of a cholesterol lowering medication made by Pfizer. Very rarely, a company that is developing a drug might give the drug a company code, which is used by people within the company to identify the drug while it is in development. For example, CDP870 is UCB’s company code for Cimzia.

Generic names and affixes
Internationally, generic names, known as the International Nonproprietary Name, are issued by the World Health Organization (WHO) in several languages, including English. Drugs that are marketed in the United States are further assigned generic names, officially known as the United States Adopted Name (USAN), by the USAN Council. Likewise, drugs are assigned a British Approved Name (BAN) in Great Britain by the British Pharmacopoeia, a standard followed in many other countries. While efforts are made to coordinate these various standards, differences may arise. For example, the drug with generic USAN acetaminophen is the same chemical N-(4-hydroxyphenyl)acetamide as the drug that has BAN and INN paracetamol.

Generic names are used for a variety of reasons. They provide a clear and unique identifier for active chemical substances, appearing on all drug labels, advertising and other information about the substance. They are used in New Drug Applications for the US Food and Drug Administration, in scientific descriptions of the chemical, in discussions of the chemical in the scientific literature and descriptions of clinical trials. The prefixes and infixes have no pharmacological significance and are used to separate the drug from others in the same class. Suffixes or stems may be found in the middle or more often the end of the drug name, and normally suggest the action of the drug. Generic names often have suffixes that define what class the drug is.

Breaking down a drug name
If name of the drug solanezumab were to be broken down, it would be divided into two parts like this: solane-zumab. -Zumab is the suffix for humanized monoclonal antibody. Monoclonal antibodies by definition contain only a single antibody clone and have binding specificity for one particular epitope. In the case of solanezumab, the antibody is designed to bond to the amyloid-ß peptides which make up protein plaques on the neurons of people with Alzheimer's disease. These plaques keep neurons from communicating, so the antibody is designed to destroy them.