Zostavax Pharmaceutical naming for Merck

Meeting the FDA’s myriad requirements for pharmaceutical naming (while retaining a milligram of marketing appeal) is always tough. That’s why most pharmaceutical names resemble Slavic gods (like Ipabog or Krsnik). For Merck’s shingles vaccine, we loved Zostavax (from vaccine and herpes zoster, the name for shingles). It was meaningful, easy to say, and—hold on to your pill fob—had only one set of adjacent consonants.