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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Gone are the good old days when medicines had simple, easy to pronounce names such as aspirin, paracetamol and morphine. Nowadays pharmaceutical companies almost seem to revel in giving drugs names that are near impossible to pronounce, such as phenoxymethylpenicillin (pronounced phen-oxi-methal-pen-a-sil-an) or hydrochlorothiazide (hydro-clor-o-thia-zide) or sulfamethoxazole (sol-fa-me-thox-a-zol). To make things even more confusing, some medicines have multiple names depending on whether they have been approved for sale to the public and if companies have created their own brand name. But despite the seemingly random selection of drug names, there’s a defined structure to how they are decided. And recently, the European Medicines Agency (the largest government agency for the approval of drugs in the world and similar to Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration) released draft guidelines on the selection and approval of names for new medicines.Inventors, chemical and code namesThere was a time when there were no rules for how a drug was named. Usually, it was up to the inventor to decide and, more often than not, that person named the compound after (usually) himself. Condy’s crystals, for instance, is the purple bath salt used as a disinfectant named after a chemist called Henry Condy. Arthur Whitfield was a dermatologist who developed Whitfield’s Ointment to treat fungal infections. And then there’s Lassar’s Paste, which is used to treat nappy rash and is named for Oskar Lassar, a German scientist.Things are different now.Chances are that any new drug will have come from a pharmaceutical company. These companies invent hundreds or thousands of new molecules each year that they hope to turn into saleable medicines. With this sort of volume being produced, pharmaceutical companies don’t have the time, or the need really, to name all of them. At this stage, drug molecules have two names – their chemical name and a
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