Alexander Kobulnicky

In the big news of the day Thursday, an FDA panel rejected the first new diet pill developed in over a decade, a combination of the old standby phentermine with the anticonvulsant topiramate. Flimsy excuses like “heart attacks” and “psychiatric problems” were offered, but I think we all know what the issue was:

Vivus Inc., whose stock prices, reputation and business were riding on this new drug, named it Qnexa, a name that doesn’t even approach hailing distance of a word, yet manages to suggest both “anorexia” and a winning move in Scrabble. Naturally, Vivus doesn’t offer any documentation on how to pronounce this non-word, and now that it’s set to join Fen-phen in the dustbin of pharmaceuticals, I don’t suppose they’ll ever bother.

But this suggests a real failure in marketing. Everyone knows that naming a drug is important for marketing to consumers. It’s well known in the food industry that people eat with their eyes — but they dope with their ears. Nobody would smoke crack if it were called “fart”, while “Viagra” is a poem unto itself. Vivus may have thought they could iron out their horrible nomenclature after it got approved, but perhaps they forgot that FDA regulators are people too; FDA regulators consider marketing as much as the rest of us. Indeed, more so. If you’re paid to think and write about medication all day, day in and day out, surely the lousy aesthetic standards in the drug industry will come to gall you. How else can you strike back?

In other words, if you wouldn’t take a pill called Qnexa, why would you approve a pill called Qnexa?