International nonproprietary name

Mandate
The World Health Organization has a constitutional mandate to "develop, establish and promote international standards with respect to biological, pharmaceutical and similar products".
The World Health Organization collaborates closely with INN experts and national nomenclature committees to select a single name of worldwide acceptability for each active substance that is to be marketed as a pharmaceutical. To avoid confusion, which could jeopardize the safety of patients, trade-marks should neither be derived from INNs nor contain common stems used in INNs.

WHO^[1]

An international nonproprietary name (INN) is an official generic and nonproprietary name given to a pharmaceutical drug or an active ingredient.^[2] INNs are intended to make communication more precise by providing a unique standard name for each active ingredient, to avoid prescribing errors.^[1] The INN system has been coordinated by the World Health Organization (WHO) since 1953.^[3]

Having unambiguous standard names for each drug (standardization of drug nomenclature) is important because a drug may be sold by many different brand names, or a branded medication may contain more than one drug. For example, the branded medications Celexa, Celapram and Citrol all contain the same active ingredient: citalopram; and the antibiotic widely known by the brand name Bactrim contains two active ingredients: trimethoprim and sulfamethoxazole. This combination of two antibiotic agents in one tablet has been available as a generic for decades, but the brand names Bactrim and Septra are still in common use.

Each drug's INN is unique but may contain a word stem that is shared with other drugs of the same class; for example, the beta blocker drugs propranolol and atenolol share the -olol suffix, and the benzodiazepine drugs lorazepam and diazepam share the -azepam suffix.

The WHO issues INNs in English, Latin, French, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, and Chinese, and a drug's INNs are often cognate across most or all of the languages, with minor spelling or pronunciation differences, for example: paracetamol (en) paracetamolum (la), paracétamol (fr) and парацетамол (ru). An established INN is known as a recommended INN (rINN), while a name that is still being considered is called a proposed INN (pINN).^[3]

^ ^a ^b "International Nonproprietary Names". World Health Organization. Archived from the original on 25 October 2013. Retrieved 21 March 2014.
^ World Health Organization, Guidance on INN, archived from the original on August 9, 2014, retrieved October 5, 2020.
^ ^a ^b Serafini M, Cargnin S, Massarotti A, Tron GC, Pirali T, Genazzani AA (April 2021). "What's in a Name? Drug Nomenclature and Medicinal Chemistry Trends using INN Publications". Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. 64 (8): 4410–4429. doi:10.1021/acs.jmedchem.1c00181. PMC 8154580. PMID 33847110.

[WHO-1] "International Nonproprietary Names". World Health Organization. Archived from the original on 25 October 2013. Retrieved 21 March 2014.

[WHO_innguidance-2] World Health Organization, Guidance on INN, archived from the original on August 9, 2014, retrieved October 5, 2020.

[:0-3] Serafini M, Cargnin S, Massarotti A, Tron GC, Pirali T, Genazzani AA (April 2021). "What's in a Name? Drug Nomenclature and Medicinal Chemistry Trends using INN Publications". Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. 64 (8): 4410–4429. doi:10.1021/acs.jmedchem.1c00181. PMC 8154580. PMID 33847110.

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