As we reported here back in July 2015, FDA has warned patients and healthcare professionals about a potential look-alike, sound-alike naming issue with an antidepressant Brintellix (vortioxetine) and Brilinta (ticagrelor), a blood thinning agent.
Yesterday, FDA announced that they had approved a name change for the antidepressant product to Trintellix. This change hopefully will help avoid medication errors for these products that previously had sound-alike and look-alike names. It is unclear how the names (which were very similar) gained FDA approval in the first place, especially with the degree of scrutiny that FDA evaluates brand names for products, but that is an issue for another day.
Over the course of many years there, while there have been a few brand name changes, the FDA has a pretty good record in avoiding the kind of confusion that these two names apparently caused. The full FDA announcement can be found here.
