>>The “-pam” at the end stands for positive allosteric modulator!
I'm gonna go with urban legend for this one. The early benzos look to me to be chemically named; "azepine" is the word for a 7-membered ring made up of 6 carbon atoms and 1 nitrogen, then "diazepine" is the same but with two nitrogens. The first benzo was chlordiazepoxide (Librium), which if you look at the chemical structure on wikipedia, contains chlorine, diazepine and oxide (the oxygen atom). Then next is diazepam, which to me looks like "diazepine" plus "amide" (which is the word for "double-bonded oxygen atom with a nitrogen next door"). 10 years later we get alprazolam, which looks like it was named after the triazole ring (that's the 5-membered ring with 3 nitrogens), but now the "am" suffix is starting to become generic, to emphasise that its still in the same chemical class as the previous -azepams.
I doubt that the concept of "positive allosteric modulator" existed in 1955 when chlordiazepoxide was invented; in those days drugs were discovered by making random chemicals and feeding them to animals to see what happened. The receptor theory of medchem (i.e. that drugs have a specific biochemical target in the body) is generally credited to James Black and his fellow Nobel laureates, and propranolol (the first drug discovered in the target-based way) wasn't patented until 1962.
>>The “-pam” at the end stands for positive allosteric modulator!
I'm gonna go with urban legend for this one. The early benzos look to me to be chemically named; "azepine" is the word for a 7-membered ring made up of 6 carbon atoms and 1 nitrogen, then "diazepine" is the same but with two nitrogens. The first benzo was chlordiazepoxide (Librium), which if you look at the chemical structure on wikipedia, contains chlorine, diazepine and oxide (the oxygen atom). Then next is diazepam, which to me looks like "diazepine" plus "amide" (which is the word for "double-bonded oxygen atom with a nitrogen next door"). 10 years later we get alprazolam, which looks like it was named after the triazole ring (that's the 5-membered ring with 3 nitrogens), but now the "am" suffix is starting to become generic, to emphasise that its still in the same chemical class as the previous -azepams.
I doubt that the concept of "positive allosteric modulator" existed in 1955 when chlordiazepoxide was invented; in those days drugs were discovered by making random chemicals and feeding them to animals to see what happened. The receptor theory of medchem (i.e. that drugs have a specific biochemical target in the body) is generally credited to James Black and his fellow Nobel laureates, and propranolol (the first drug discovered in the target-based way) wasn't patented until 1962.