Business survival forces Isis Pharma to rename itself

One month after denying the need for a name change, Isis Pharmaceuticals, in a complete U-turn on Friday announced that it has now rebranded itself Ionis Pharmaceuticals.

It said its new ticker symbol on Nasdaq would change to IONS on 22 December.

Stanley Crooke, CEO and founder of the San Diego-based biotech company, said he finally decided to make the change after fending off colleagues, advisors and even random strangers who urged him to discard the name shared by the terrorist organisation.
 
''My underlying concern was that the name was a distraction,'' Crooke says.

''To spend any time during a four-minute TV interview, for example, discussing our name, rather than focusing on how exciting things are at Isis today with three drugs finishing Phase 3 development and a pipeline of 40 drugs, just makes no sense,'' Forbes reported.

The notion that Crooke's company needed to change its name first came up in one such TV interview in September 2014 on investor Jim Cramer's CNBC show ''Mad Money.''

Cramer had been a long-time evangelist of Isis' stock, but he told Crooke that the name of his company was becoming a liability, with the terror group hitting the headlines every other day.

Cramer told Crooke that the matter could not be laughed off adding, he needed the CEO's ''help'' figuring out how to talk about the company every time he mentioned its name.

While explaining its decision to change its name to Ionis Pharmaceuticals, the biotech company made no explicit mention of terror.

But for the company formerly known as Isis, the rise of the terror network had clearly become a growing problem.

"Our goal is to create medicines that will save patients' lives, and we are proud to be at the forefront of creating innovative medicines," said Lynne Parshall, chief operating officer at Ionis Pharmaceuticals.  "We decided to change our company name because, when people see or hear our name, we want them to think about the life-saving medicines we are developing."

In June 2014, according to a Wall Street Journal article an association with negative press about ISIS terrorists might be behind a 7 per cent drop in the pharma firm's stock.

Last month following the Paris attacks, CNNMoney raised the possibility that terrorists had again struck Isis Pharmaceuticals' shares, which declined 4 per cent despite no relevant news.