How to play the game of naming new drugs

New drug names are supposed to ring a long line of bells. They're supposed to be easy to remember, elicit some connection to the conditions they treat, a no-brainer for harried doctors to write out on a scrip and really quite clever overall from a marketing perspective. So why are we getting names like Incivek for telaprevir, or such clunkers as Yervoy, Viibryd, Zytiga, Xgeva, asks Xconomy's Luke Timmerman. "Somewhere, the folks who sell Coca-Cola must be giggling at their friends who went into pharmaceuticals," notes the veteran biotech scribe. So he talked with one of the industry's top experts are drug names to see what was up. Column