Have you always assumed a drug product marketed without a proprietary (brand) name to be a generic drug? If your answer is Yes, you may have inadvertently substituted and dispensed products that are not therapeutically equivalent. For example, the drug product albuterol sulfate HFA, manufactured by IVAX, was approved without a proprietary name on Oct. 29, 2004, under NDA 21-457. Since the IVAX albuterol sulfate HFA product is labeled with only the established (generic) name, one could easily assume this is a generic version of one of the other two currently marketed albuterol sulfate HFA products: Proventil HFA and Ventolin HFA.

The absence of a trade name does not necessarily equal a generic drug, and therapeutically equivalent products may not be interchangeable.

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The absence of a trade name does not equal a generic drug

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