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Firms must navigate legal and linguistic hurdles for approval They are the public face of products that can take many years and hundreds of millions of dollars to develop. Over time, they often become household names: Think Prozac or Viagra. But drug names start out as alien words: random collections of syllables that can sometimes seem almost as mind-boggling as the complicated chemistry and biology that went into the development of the new medication. Earlier this year, one such feat of linguistic alchemy took place at Cambridge-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc., where an experimental drug to treat hepatitis C, which had been known for years as either VX-950 or telaprevir, was finally dubb
