The Pharmaceutical Industry Discovers the Letter "Q"

The pharmaceutical industry uses computers to generate possible or suggested names for new drugs, and has been doing so for a long time.

The computers are programmed with algorithms so as to respect some of the laws or constraints of English--for example, permitted sequences of letters.

For a long time, it seems, the computers were not allowed to use the letter q in any proposed drug names. In English, the letter q is almost always followed by u (the exceptions are merely a couple of words which come from other languages).

Now, however, that seems to have changed, and we are seeing drug names with q in them:

Rinvoq. Here that final q evidently could be a k or ck.

Cibinqo. Here, although no u follows the q, evidently the pronunciation is just as if the word in fact ended in quo.

Kisqali. Same comment as above.

Qulipta. Evidently this is to be pronounced with the initial syllable being "kew".

Qutenza, Same as above.

Uqora. Here, as with the previous two drug names, we evidently need to pretend that there's a qu rather than just q. Virtually no English words are spelled with a q without a u following. Plus, this seems to be another example of using a vowel for its name rather than its phonetic value (as in ibuprofen, Xfinity).     

It's anybody's guess why the pharmaceutical industry has started using such weird names. Maybe all the good ones have been used already.

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