POCA Online Search for Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences Trademark Searches

With the race to find new medical solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic ongoing, the crisis has generated rapid developments in the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries. Having fast and reliable intellectual property clearance tools enabling this is crucial and Corsearch is proud to support this important work.

In April 2020, as a thank you to everyone working on developing new drugs, Corsearch began an initiative where we waived fees for new users wishing to access our Phonetic and Orthographic Computer Analysis (POCA) Online Search tool for FDA, EMA, Canada, and Pharma-in-use databases. That period of free access for new users finishes at the end of July 2020, but the search will obviously continue. For anyone new to pharma search, here is our brief introduction to POCA and to the Corsearch POCA Online Search solution.

What is Phonetic Orthographic Computer Analysis (POCA)?

Designed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), POCA is an analytic algorithm-based tool to help identify drug and biologic names that are phonetically and/or orthographically similar to one another.

This is necessary because pharmaceutical branding remains one of the most challenging endeavors in the naming industry. This is due to the processes involved in gaining approval for proprietary drug names, which must pass both regulatory and legal tests. Branded drug names are judged stringently not just for their distinctness, but also for the safety they confer. Having similarly named drugs could create confusion for consumers and so having utterly distinct names is necessary.

Corsearch POCA Online Search

Combining regulatory data sources and pharmaceutical data for a more global view of the drugs currently on the market, Corsearch has created an online, do-it-yourself tool that generates analyzed and scored pharma results instantly without the need to wait for results.

Although it can assist trademark professionals with their trademark screening and searches, POCA is a software program rather than an easily navigable online report. Corsearch’s POCA Online Search, however, collects data from different pharmaceutical databases, organizing it in a visually appealing, searchable format. Corsearch’s POCA Online Search includes scores-based results on phonetic, orthographic, and the average of phonetic and orthographic matches. Users have the option to set a threshold for POCA similarity scoring to further fine-tune results in real time.

Corsearch’s POCA Online Search enables you to search the following databases and create reports accordingly:

• Regulatory POCA Search – covering either U.S. FDA, Health Canada, or European Medicines Agency (EMA) with locally-approved drugs for EU (so-called Article 57) and SwissMedic.
• Search pharmaceutical-in-use (PIU) databases on a regional or global basis.
• Candidate Drug Name Comparison – a direct comparison feature that allows users to score ad hoc pairs of names against a pre-defined list of drug names.

Corsearch POCA Online Search covers multiple regulatory databases:

• S. – Drugs@FDA, Orange Book, RxNorm.
• Canada – Canada DPD, Canada NNHPD.
• Europe – EMA (centrally approved), decentrally approved (Article 57), and SwissMedic. On top of approved drugs, the search will contain, by default, a POCA search against PIU covering European countries.

At all stages of the naming procedure, POCA reviews are now an invaluable part of the process when carrying out proprietary name reviews globally. For more information on how POCA

Online Search can help you, please contact your local account manager or email us at [email protected].