Memorable, distinctive, not too ‘sciencey’: why we named our biotech firm Anocca

In 2013, when we decided to set up our company, naming it was one of the first steps we took. At the time, I was at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, Germany, doing my second postdoctoral placement; my first had been in New Zealand, where I did my PhD. A Swedish colleague introduced me to Mikael Blomqvist, a serial entrepreneur who has built a lot of companies.

Mikael and I talked about the business concept behind the company, which was to create a purpose-built platform to decipher T-cell immunity. At that point, it was just an idea on paper: it wasn’t going to be a spin-off or an incremental adaptation of existing laboratory methodologies.

We wrote a business plan, and all that stuff, but in parallel, we initiated a branding strategy with a small Swedish communications firm called Milou, based in Karlskrona, which Mikael had used previously. I quit my job and moved to Sweden in December 2013.

Why a silly-sounding name suits the serious mission of our biotech spin-off

We were quite methodical in the name-selection process. We wanted something that would be memorable and that would roll off the tongue. We wanted a name that would look nice, generate positive feelings and be distinctive.

We had a longlist of ten contenders — including Genevie and Genovia, reflecting the strong focus on genetics behind the company. I personally didn’t like these, because I thought they were too sciencey. I think something distinctive, unique, was the right way to go.

There was a very memorable moment when we decided to prioritize a name that started with an ‘A’. Published research¹ had shown a benefit to starting a name with a letter that occurs early in the alphabet, so we decided to apply that concept to the company name.

Once we’d decided to start with an ‘A’, we wanted to end with an ‘A’, too, to make the name soft and approachable. And we wanted to have a double consonant in the middle.

We also wanted a name that had a sort of symmetry, and that’s when we came up with Anocca. Although not palindromic, the word has the visual appearance of a palindrome, particularly with the font we selected for the branding.

Anocca is a made-up name with no direct scientific or technical meaning (from our own investigations, we couldn’t see that it had any meaning in any language). It was selected on the basis of cognitive-recall principles (designed to aid memorability), and we tested it among ourselves, and with friends and family.

The business of science