UMINNA

BACKGROUND

The World Health Organization (WHO), whose mission is to improve health worldwide, established the International Nonproprietary Names (INN) Program for pharmaceutical substances in 1950 through Resolution WHA3.11. This program, based on the expertise of a committee of specialists, aims to assign a unique and standardized name to each pharmacologically active substance. More than 10,000 INNs have been created to date, with approximately 400 new entries added each year. These names are based on a structured nomenclature system governed by specific general principles and are then transliterated into several languages, including French, to ensure their global dissemination.

Originally derived from chemical names, INNs are now constructed around a key segment (or “stem”) that reflects the substance’s pharmacological mode of action. For example, the suffix -triptan is reserved for serotonin receptor agonists, used in the treatment of migraine. This segment is preceded by an arbitrary prefix, chosen to avoid any connotations and to remain phonetically accessible in most languages. Certain sounds or letter combinations are thus excluded from the nomenclature to limit the risk of ambiguity.

This naming system contributes to the WHO’s public health objective by providing a common, neutral language for pharmaceutical substances. Due to their standardized morphological structure, INNs convey valuable classification information that could enhance understanding of the underlying pharmacological mechanisms. Our hypothesis is that wider use of these terms in everyday discourse would contribute to cognitive mechanisms that facilitate learning about the properties of medications. To test this idea, it is relevant to analyze the uses of INNs in different types of discourse, particularly by comparing them to brand names of medications, which are widely used in everyday language.

The proposed project involves studying the occurrence and treatment of INNs in various corpora: general-interest press, specialized scientific publications, and, potentially, works by pharmacy students. In particular, the project will aim to identify the contexts in which INNs are used, any metalinguistic comments that accompany them, and to compare their use with that of brand names for identical molecules. For example, the pairs fluoxetine / Prozac, diazepam / Valium, and ibuprofen / Advil will be the subject of an initial series of contrastive analyses.

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STUDENT CONTRIBUTION

The student’s assignment will focus on a linguistic analysis of DCI, with the aim of better understanding the discursive and contextual conditions that promote their use. Initially, the student will need to identify the available corpora relevant to this study, in English (and possibly in French), and compare their characteristics: general-interest press, specialized press, scientific corpora, corpora related to a specific context such as the COVID-19 pandemic, or educational corpora from pharmaceutical training programs.

In a second phase, the student will develop queries in Corpus Query Language (CQL) to extract and quantify the occurrences of INNs in the various corpora, based on their distinctive morphological properties. They will also conduct a contrastive analysis of the uses of DCI/brand name pairs and identify any rephrasings, glosses, or metalinguistic comments that may accompany these terms. This work will help identify the criteria for the activation of these terms in different contexts.

Finally, based on the initial results, the student will propose a methodological summary aimed at identifying recommendations for further research on the use of INNs. This summary will include an analysis of the terminological characteristics of INNs, potential barriers to their adoption, and their possible role in the acquisition of pharmacological knowledge. This entire project is part of an interdisciplinary approach combining linguistics, terminology, and health sciences.