-
The inside story behind Pfizer and BioNTech’s new vaccine brand name, Comirnaty
Comirnaty. It’s a name we’ll all know soon.
The new brand name for Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine, Comirnaty mashes up community, immunity, mRNA and COVID—pretty much everything that could fit into the moniker for the world’s most high-profile product at the moment.
How did those concepts become a brand? We asked the naming agency behind both Comirnaty and its non-proprietary name, tozinameran—industry heavyweight Brand Institute, which began working with BioNTech in April. Pfizer joined the effort shortly after, when the duo’s vaccine collaboration was announced.
“The name is coined from Covid-19 immunity, and then embeds the mRNA in the middle, which is the platform technology, and as a whole the name is meant to evoke the word community,” Scott Piergrossi, Brand Institute president of operations and communications, said.
The goal in naming drugs is to overlap ideas and layer meaning into a name, he said. In this case, the high-priority concepts the teams started with were COVID immunization and the mRNA technology. The clients themselves came up with community as an image and association they wanted to elicit, Piergrossi said.
So that’s the Co- prefix, followed by the mRNA in the middle, and ending with the -ty suffix, which nods to both community and immunity. Plus, community and immunity are conceptually mnemonic across the entire name.
“Identifying those word parts and plugging into the community concept really executed nicely at the end of the day,” Piergrossi said.
Comirnaty is pronounced phonetically as koe mir’ na tee, while tozinameran is toe zi na’ mer an.
The tozinameran generic name was established in two parts, Piergrossi explained. The first half, tozina-, is the invented prefix required by the World Health Organization, while the second half -meran is the required suffix for new mRNA vaccines.
Comirnaty has been officially approved by Swiss and European regulators, and the nonproprietary tozinameran has been approved by the WHO. While the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine has been approved for emergency use in the U.S., the brand name awaits FDA approval.
“Of course, Comirnaty was not the only name BioNTech and Pfizer considered…”