“Pharmaceuticals are the only product in the world that require government approval of the brand name to go to market.”

Scott Piergrossi
President, Creative
Brand Institute
… on the BioNTX “Inside Innovation” podcast.

For biotech startups racing toward FDA approval, one step tends to get pushed to the back of the line: the name. That step tends to catch companies off guard, according to the team at Brand Institute.

In a recent episode of BioNTX’s “Inside Innovation” podcast, three Brand Institute leaders laid out why drug naming isn’t a branding exercise. It’s a regulated, global, and high-stakes process that can make or break commercialization timelines.

Most products can be trademarked and taken to market. Not pharmaceuticals. A drug name must clear review by the FDA, European Medicines Agency, Health Canada, and other agencies before it goes anywhere.

That makes the process uniquely constrained, according to Brand Institute’s Scott Piergrossi. A name can’t sound like or look like another drug. And if you’re going global, the screening list is enormous. “We’re talking over 200,000 names we’re screening against,” he said. “That’s more words than there are in the English language. So imagine creating a new English word that doesn’t sound like or look like another English word.”

Names also can’t be promotional — no overstating efficacy, no painting “too fanciful of a picture,” as Piergrossi put it. The result is what he calls “very suggestive coined names” — invented words where “I see something in there, but it’s not overstating it.”

Founders wait too long

“Start early” came up repeatedly, and it didn’t sound like filler.

“If we’re dealing with a pharmaceutical, it’s start early, keep it often, and think about your global strategy from the beginning,” said Brian Frasca, divisional president at Brand Institute. The risk of waiting, he said, is ending up in a scramble right when a company is preparing for approval.

Jack Stohlquist, vice president of brand development in the firm’s Dallas office, put it bluntly: early-stage biotechs “think they’re going to wait to the last second” to start naming — “when in reality it’s a much longer process.” The cost of starting early is relatively low, he said. The cost of starting late is not.

The science behind naming

In biotech, even the name is part of the science, and the process is more computational than most founders expect.

Brand Institute screens candidates against that massive database of existing names using proprietary tools, including one called Brand Reality Max developed by its Drug Safety Institute subsidiary. Frasca said the team expanded an FDA algorithm for phonetic and orthographic analysis to cover seven languages. Then a separate linguistics panel evaluates names across 41 languages and dialects.

It’s not just about whether a name works in English. Frasca described scenarios where a name that tested well in the U.S. carried negative connotations in Portuguese or didn’t translate in a French-speaking Canadian market. “You have to think about it early,” he said, “but you also have to give yourself flexibility.”

Why it matters beyond branding

Piergrossi noted that naming stakes go beyond timelines and trademarks. It’s humbling: “Sometimes when I step back, and I think about the relationship that patients have with the products we name,” he said, “in many cases they are putting their life, their trust into this product to deliver… and the brand plays a role in how they relate to that brand.”

The podcast

The conversation comes from  “BioNTX Presents: Inside Innovation,” a newish podcast series hosted by BioNTX Chief Communications Officer Eric B. Moore. The series profiles players and processes across North Texas life sciences — from biomanufacturing logistics to biosecurity to startup development. Nine episodes have dropped so far.

Find all the episodes on BioNTX’s YouTube channel here.

For more of who said what about all things North Texas, check out Every Last Word.

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