Igor has posted an extensive taxonomy of company names in the biotech / pharmaceutical industries, classified by category and by level of engagement. On this chart, note that few companies have broken away from the pack; nearly all of them are heavily clustered in the lower levels of engagement.

The names that rise to the top do so because they are different, but most importantly because they are different for a good reason. These companies are using their names to distance themselves from the negative baggage that exists in their industry in the same way that Merck and ADM are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to assure the public that they are working with nature rather than against it, and that they are not cold, uncaring, profit-mad corporations. Further, these names help distance these few companies from the “GenGen”* names that conjure memories of lost investments.

* “GenGen” is our term for all of the “me too” company names that begin or end in “gen” in the biotech / pharmaceutical sector, as can clearly be seen in the lower lefthand corner of the biopharma name taxonomy.