If you happen to look for news on
Google Finance this week about Exelon Corp. (
NYSE: EXC), owner of Peco Energy, you may end up getting a list of stories about a treatment for Alzheimer's bearing the same name as the utility. Turns out some programs are automatically inserting “EXC” behind “Exelon” in news stories, even if it's about the drug. A little history: Novartis AG (
NYSE: NVS) got FDA approval for its Alzheimer's treatment called Exelon back in April 2000 and grabbed the URL
www.exelon.com also. Six months
later the name "Exelon" was bestowed on the new power company created through the merger of Peco and Chicago's Unicom Corp. That's why its URL is
www.exeloncorp.com. Its spokeswoman, Sabrina Miller, told us that Exelon-the-utility "was fully aware of the Exelon drug name. Novartis did not have exclusive rights to the name because the uses and the industries are vastly different. There is not then and not now any likelihood of consumer confusion." Search engines, of course, are of course a different matter. It not entirely clear how Google got tripped up. One of the stories
containing the wrong link came from AFX, the business information service.
The whole business of thinking up drug names is pretty well-regulated and monitored by the FDA, which has to make sure a guy needing high-blood pressure medicine doesn't accidentally take Viagra. Drug names are often, perhaps ironically, based on art as much as science. The individual risk is probably less in the choice of power company names, although we wonder what both companies were thinking when they settled on Exelon, which sounds more like an evil planet from Star Trek than a medicine or utility.
- Jonathan Berr
