This list of pharmaceutical compound number prefixes provides codes used by individual pharmaceutical companies when naming their pharmaceutical drug candidates. Pharmaceutical companies generally produce large numbers of compounds in the research phase for which it is impractical to use often long and cumbersome systematic chemical names, and for which the effort to generate nonproprietary names may not be warranted, see article on drug nomenclature. Instead, these compounds are usually given a number for internal reference at the company. To distinguish the numbered compounds from different companies (or academic laboratories), each compound number is prefixed with a letter code indicating the company that developed the compound, that claims intellectual property on that compound etc. The letter code is conceived by companies themselves who should be interested in creating a unique code. Three main methods are found for prefixing the numeric identifier – with a space (gap), with nothing (concatenated), and with a dash (or hyphen).
For example, ABT-199 is a compound developed at Abbott Laboratories, and this name has been used in early publications of research results. Later the compound was assigned the international nonproprietary name (INN) venetoclax. Similarly, other compounds may be given a USAN or BAN for example. Finally, the compound may be given a trade name for example for marketing purposes.
A long list of code designations with corresponding trade names can be found in Appendix IV of the USP Dictionary, see article on drug nomenclature.
Note that this convention of composing compound identifiers from a company identifier followed by a number is not always followed. For example, the letter code may reflect a therapeutic/disease area or an internal project name. A randomly picked example is SC for spinal cord injury.
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