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By Jim Edwards
Would you take a pill made by a company called Pain? What if it was called Silence? How about Pisgah Labs? Branding isn't much of a concern in the pharmaceutical business — and it shows. Here are 10 companies that have ugly, weird or just plain strange names.
Silence has a development deal with Pfizer — which is a weird name on its own, it's just that we're used to hearing it — for a macular edema drug. The company get its name from its RNA interference technique that "silences" targeted gene protein production — not that it bothers to explain that on its Web site or anything.
A blue butterfly floats above a foggy beach ... Welcome to Pain! OK, so the company makes painkillers and its name makes grammatical sense. But apply some common sense: Does anyone want to say they work at Pain?
Not such a weird name until you hear the rumor that CEO Chang Anh christened the company by combining the latin for king, "rex," with his own last name. King Ahn. Really?
A representative for the company did not return calls for comment.
Pisgah is developing an abuse deterrent opioid painkiller product. Just don't say its name out loud — no one will know what you're talking about.
There's nothing specifically strange about Apricus' name, until you learn that it's developing a skin cream that treats premature ejaculation. Insert your own joke here.
Sounds like it could be sexy until you realize the company's research areas are incontinence, uterine bleeding, STDs and other conditions that affect women. Like Pain, Femme went with overt literalism in its search for a brand.
Cheesy, sure, but surely not strange? Turns out that Dream is the U.S.'s current supplier of lethal injection drugs for death row executions, so its patients won't be doing very much dreaming of their own. And it's run out of the back of a driving school in London.
As my BNET colleague Steve Tobak puts it: "Bristol-Myers Squibb is idiotic. Hyphenated, not hyphenated, which is it?" Plus, it doesn't make squibs.
The company's German name is so difficult to pronounce that it has a YouTube video — featuring Germans failing to say it correctly — as an instructional aid to staff. It's "bear-ring-her-ing-gell-hime," FYI.
It's one thing to name a company after yourself — it's your company, you built it, so why not? But the name of CEO Al Mann's outfit cheekily suggests that it, unlike any other drug company, embodies the spirit of humanity. Hmm.