Eli Lilly's New Weight Loss Drug May Have the Worst Name in Pharmaceutical History

Pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly announced promising clinical trial results this week for a daily pill to treat obesity and diabetes.

Besides the good news of minimal side effects and impressive results, though, the pill has an extremely unfortunate quality: its name.

The drug, which was first discovered by Chugai Pharmaceutical and licensed to Eli Lilly in 2018, is called "orforglipron," a word so perplexingly unpronounceable — "or fugly pron"? — that it defies belief.

According to the company, it's pronounced "or-for-GLIP-ron," which is such a mouthful that it's nearly impossible to imagine it becoming a household name like "Ozempic."

The pharmaceutical industry has a long and well-earned reputation for cooking up terrible names for drugs, from the anti-cancer medication "carfilzomib" to the melanoma treatment "talimogene laherparepvec" to "idarucizumab," which counteracts the blood-thinning effects of other medications.

But there are several good reasons why the names are so bonkers. For one, clinicians have warned that if they sound too similar, they could lead to potentially dangerous prescription errors.

It also takes years for a drug to get its name, a process that requires drugmakers to abide by a complex system of international rules.

A system of prefixes and stems indicating what the drug does often determines the name of a drug. According to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health publication Global Health NOW, drugmakers must avoid the letters Y, H, K, J, and W, which aren't used in all Roman alphabet-based languages.

Some drug names end up being completely made up, making no reference to anything, in what's referred to as an "empty vessel." (The most famous example is Prozac.)

To be clear, the word "orforglipron" won't appear on Eli Lilly's consumer-facing packaging if it ever hits the market. It's the drug's generic name, so it could eventually be marketed under a different brand name.

The medication is a glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) agonist, much like the extremely popular semaglutide-based injections, such as Novo Nordisk's Wegovy and Ozempic.

But what sets it apart is the fact that it's a "small-molecule" agonist that can be taken orally and at "any time of the day without restrictions on food and water intake," according to Eli Lilly.

Scientists are hoping that orforglipron, which belongs to an emerging class of "glipron" medications, could provide an easy-to-administer alternative to other diabetes and obesity drugs.

A separate glipron, which has the slightly-less-headache-inducing name "danuglipron," is currently being developed by Pfizer. Like orforglipron, it's a once-a-day weight management pill.

However, the pharmaceutical firm ran into some trouble two years into developing and testing the drug, finding that the pill had caused "liver injury" in a study participant earlier this year.

Eli Lilly appears to have had far more success, announcing promising Phase 3 trial results last week. The news caused the pharmaceutical's share price to surge — and the stock of Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk to plummet.

More on weight loss drugs: Human Experiments on GLP-1 Pill Looking Extremely Promising

The post Eli Lilly's New Weight Loss Drug May Have the Worst Name in Pharmaceutical History appeared first on Futurism.