Earlier this month Labiotech published its roundup of the top biotech deals for May 2026. Heading the list was Angelini Pharma’s $4.1 billion acquisition of Catalyst Pharmaceuticals, just ahead of UCB’s acquisition of Candid Therapeutics for $2.2 billion. For its part, Lilly also acquired Curevo for $1.5 billion, and GSK took over at SiranBio for up to a billion in milestone payments. Meanwhile, in Labiotech’s summary of the top funding rounds in May, companies like Apogee Therapeutics ($1.3 billion), CellCentirc ($220 million), CREAT Medicines ($122 million), Cytospire Therapeutics ($83 million) and Accro Bioscience ($50 million) were five of the ten largest private biotech funding rounds in the world.
All of these companies represent vastly different approaches to biotech and biopharma, with focus areas in immunology, oncology, inflammatory disease, rare disease, infectious disease, and artificial intelligence (AI). Geographically they can be found in North America, Europe, and Asia, and while Catalyst was founded back in 2002, Cytospire and Candid were launched more recently in 2023 and 2024, respectively.
Besides their recent success grabbing headlines, these companies have little in common across the board, save for one thing: their names. In this article we take a dive into the naming conventions that exist in the biotech industry and explore why the next big thing in biopharma is more likely to be a company with a name beginning with A, C or S than with W, Y or Z.
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Biotech company names and pre-internet conventions
When Jeff Bezos was choosing the name for his online bookshop he wanted to focus on the ‘magic’ of ordering a product online in the early 1990s, so he called it Cadabra, as in the magician’s refrain ‘abracadabra’. After a lawyer confused the name with the term ‘cadaver’, however, he quickly changed the name to Amazon, noting that it would connote one of the world’s biggest rivers and land very near the top of any alphabetized list of companies in a directory.
In the pre-internet era, having a company name that started with an A was preferable to one that started with a Z as, in alphabetically ordered telephone directories, customers were more likely to favor names near the front of the book than near the back. While this likely influenced the thinking of Jeff Bezos in 1994, thirty years later there is no built-in advantage to choosing a company name from the beginning of the alphabet than the end.
Yet in 2026, and across almost all sectors of the biotech industry, companies continue to favor names that begin with letters like A and C and avoid names beginning with W, X, Y and Z. With only a few exceptions, from antibodies and AI to vaccines and viral vectors, biotechs seem to play by the rules of the pre-internet era when it comes to naming their firms.
Assessing more than 12,000 biotech company names
We analyzed more than 12,000 unique names of active companies in the biotech and biopharma space listed in the public directory at BioPharmGuy, an all-inclusive directory and data provider based in the United States. These companies were then categorized by their focus area, for example, biosimilars, generics, radiopharmaceuticals, or one of 30 other categories. Where a company was active in more than one category, they were listed twice, and this was the case for more than 3,300 of the companies assessed. With the help of some Excel formulas and Claude AI, we then analyzed which letters were the most common first letters for names in those categories.
We found that certain letters were consistently amongst the most common starting letters for biotech names. Specifically,
- Names beginning with A were among the three most common names in every category except for two, and was the most common starting letter for a company name in 22 of 33 categories
- Names beginning with C and S were among the three most common names in 22 of 33 categories each, and were each the most common starting letters for a company name in 3 of 33 categories
At the other end of the scale, company names beginning with Q, W, X, Y and Z were among the least common across all biotech and biopharma categories.
In certain categories some other letters bucked the A/C/S name trend. Biosimilar company names most commonly began with a B, genetic and genomic company names most commonly began with a G, and nanotechnology companies most commonly chose names beginning with an N.
Yet there were also some sectors of the biopharma space where the normal rules don’t seem to apply and corporate naming conventions seem to be turned on their head.
Two exceptions to the rule: microbiome and psychedelics
When it comes to microbiome/bacteriome companies, the most common letter for names to cluster is M, followed by E. In our last review of the area in October 2025, we highlighted 11 of the most advanced microbiome players and, of those 11, eight were companies that had names beginning with either M or E.
Similarly, in psychedelics, company names clustered around P, S and B. Admittedly, the number of companies active in the space (47) is significantly lower than most others, but other relatively small sub-sectors such as biostorage (45), research proteins (59) tissue engineering (58) do not demonstrate the same divergence from the industry-wide convention around favoring names beginning with A, C and S.
Even here, exceptions prove the rule. Beckley PsyTech, a company that we spoke with on the Beyond Biotech podcast in 2025, bucks the trend here. The company working on psychedelics for depressive disorder combined with atai Life Sciences in 2025, emerging as the newly named AtaiBeckley, the sole company in the space with a corporate brand beginning with an A.
Why do so many biotech names begin with an A?
There are at least three reasons why biotech companies choose names that cluster around certain letters.
The first is what might be called the yellow pages legacy: companies are keen to be listed first in alphabetized directories and so choose company names that begin with letters like A, B and C. While there is little advantage in the age of AI-powered search queries in terms of discovery to calling yourself Aardvark Therapeutics, a century of telephone directory listings has left its mark. With the biotech industry expanding rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s at precisely the point that early internet directories like Yahoo! mirrored their offline predecessors, this might be a naming convention that the industry absorbed and has not yet shed.
The second relates to the sound of the letters when pronounced. Certain sounds, including those like the A in English, sound more open and assertive. Hence, companies cluster around words like Astra and Apex – indeed, there are at least three different companies called Apex Pharma competing for industry attention. As Guy Powell, President and Founder at ProRelevant, a marketing and consulting firm in Atlanta, told Labiotech, “I’m not so sure the starting letter is important. I would say, it’s more how easy it is to say and remember.”
A third reason is that biotech and biopharma is a business like any other and the naming conventions in the industry are aligned with broader patterns that span all industries. Writing at Branding Strategy Insider, Steve Rivkin assessed the most common letters to begin brand names and the most common letters at the start of ticker symbols on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Amongst brand names, C, S, M and A names were the most common, while for the ticker symbols it was A, C, S and B. Little surprise, perhaps, that biotech and biopharma follow the wider business trends around corporate nomenclature.
A biotech by any other name would smell as sweet?
Biotech and biopharma companies consistently cluster their corporate names around certain letters of the alphabet. Whether in a nod to a pre-internet period, an attempt to create a pleasing sound and an emotional connection with the receiver, or an alignment with corporate norms across the rest of the economy, the pattern is clear to see. Only in a handful of sub-sectors of the industry are the most common names words beginning with B or N instead of A, C and S.
Yet creativity still abounds and biotech companies rebrand regularly to embrace monikers that better represent their values, business, and therapeutic focus. Even if there are hundreds of companies that choose names that start with the letter A, success is not tied to alphabetical order: the world’s largest animal health company is Zoetis, with revenues topping $8 billion annually, and Zymeworks, a Canadian biotech, raised $59 million in its 2017 IPO on the Toronto Stock Exchange, at the time the largest Canadian biotech IPO in more than a decade. The industry is truly one where success can be found from AAA Pharma to ZZ Biotech.
