A national formulary[1] is often designated to define drug names (and purity standards) for regulatory purposes.
A company or person developing a drug can apply for a generic (nonproprietary) name through their national formulary or directly to the WHO INN Programme.
Chemical names are typically very long and too complex to be commonly used in referring to a drug in speech or in prose documents.
Relatedly, they help maintain clear differentiation between proprietary and nonproprietary aspects of reality, which people trying to sell proprietary things have an incentive to obfuscate; they help people compare apples to apples.
The fundamental advances in chemistry during the 19th century made that era the first time in which what we now call chemical nomenclature, a huge profusion of names based on atoms, functional groups, and molecules, was necessary or conceivable.
Biopharmaceuticals have posed a challenge in nonproprietary naming because unlike smaller molecules made with total synthesis or semisynthesis, there is less assurance of complete fungibility between products from different manufacturers.
[2] More comprehensive lists can be found in Appendix VII of the USP Dictionary or in the WHO INN stembook.
[11] In the case of solanezumab, the antibody is designed to bond to the amyloid-β peptides which make up protein plaques on the neurons of people with Alzheimer's disease.
Most commonly, a nonproprietary drug name has one widely agreed pronunciation in each language.
For example, the aforementioned third (and least common) pronunciation for paracetamol reflects the treatment of the acet affix as /ˈæsɪt/ rather than /əˈsiːt/ (both are accepted for acetyl[14][12]).
The World Health Organization does not give suggested pronunciations for its INNs, but familiarity with the typical sounds and spellings of the stems and affixes often points to the widely accepted pronunciation of any given INN.
The United States Pharmacopeia gives suggested pronunciations for most USANs in its USP Dictionary, which is published in annual editions.
Pharmacists also have access to pronunciations from various clinical decision support systems such as Lexicomp.
In the scientific literature, there is a set of strong conventions for drug nomenclature regarding the letter case and placement of nonproprietary and proprietary names, as follows: For example, the 2015 American Society of Hematology (ASH) publication policies say,[15] "Non-proprietary (generic/scientific) names should be used and should be lowercase.