United States Adopted Names for Drugs

The United States Adopted Names (USAN) Council is the United States committee responsible for negotiating nonproprietary names for the pharmaceutic industry. It is a nongovernmental organization sponsored by the American Medical Association, the United States Pharmacopeial Convention, and the American Pharmaceutical Association. Nonproprietary names serve a useful function that cannot be supplanted by the chemical name or trademark. The goal of the Council is to produce simple, short, unique, and useful names that can be used without restriction in the public domain. The Council also has close liaison with the International Nonproprietary Names (INN) Committee of the World Health Organization and works to establish Council-generated names as international names.