The common or nonproprietary name of a drug.
The established, official, or non-proprietary, name by which a drug is known as an isolated substance, irrespective of its manufacturer. Each drug is licensed under a generic name, and also may be given a brand name by its manufacturer. The generic name is assigned by the United States Adopted Names Council (USAN), a private group of representatives of the American Medical Association, American Pharmaceutical Association, United States Pharmacopeia and Food and Drug Administration, plus one public member. There have been recent attempts to encourage physicians to prescribe drugs by generic names whenever possible instead of by brand names. This is said to allow considerable cost savings. Considerable controversy has arisen over whether drugs sold by generic name are in fact therapeutically equivalent to their brand-name counterparts. In some cases two versions of the same drug, manufactured by the same or different manufacturers, may not, usually for reasons of bioavailability, be therapeutically equivalent. Advocates of generic prescribing question whether such differences are universal or always significant.
The name applied to a drug, which is not protected by a trademark, usually being a shortened version of the drug’s chemical name.