Ionis Brand Guidelines: Isis Pharmaceuticals of 1989, Antisense & a 2015 Rename

A Carlsbad start-up built on a single idea: antisense.

Ionis began in 1989 as Isis Pharmaceuticals, founded by Stanley Crooke to develop antisense therapy, according to English Wikipedia. When it was founded, the Associated Press reported in 2015, the company named itself after Isis, the Egyptian goddess of healing. It is based in Carlsbad, California.

Antisense medicines are short strands of genetic code designed to attach to messenger RNA and so change how much of a particular protein a cell makes. Wikipedia says Isis at first worked on antisense methods in general rather than on one drug or disease, signed early partnerships, including one with Ciba-Geigy, and went public on Nasdaq in 1991 with about 60 employees.

The early years were uneven. Wikipedia describes a field that scientific journals and regulators treated with scepticism in the 1990s. A trial treatment for human papilloma virus, cleared for human testing in 1992, was dropped in 1995, and in 1999 a Phase 3 trial of ISIS 2302 in Crohn’s disease failed, after which the company cut about 40 percent of its staff. In the mid-1990s, working with Ciba-Geigy, it changed the chemistry of its compounds, and Wikipedia calls the result its “second generation” of antisense.

Support for the field came and went. In 2000, Wikipedia says, Novartis ended its partnership with the company, and many larger drug makers dropped antisense research altogether, leaving Isis as one of very few companies still developing antisense compounds. Data from its diabetes research, presented in June 2000, helped it recover, and over the following years it rehired many of the staff it had laid off and signed a run of new partnership contracts.

In 1998 fomivirsen, sold as Vitravene for an eye infection linked to AIDS, became the first antisense drug approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, Wikipedia says; it was discontinued in 2004. The same year, according to Wikipedia, Gilead Sciences left antisense research and sold its patents to Isis.

Partners, a cholesterol drug and Spinraza.

For most of its history the company worked through partners. Wikipedia describes the model: Isis would take a drug through early testing and then license it to a larger company, which took over commercial work if the drug succeeded. In 2007 it formed Regulus Therapeutics, a joint venture with Alnylam, to work on micro-RNA. With Genzyme it developed mipomersen, sold as Kynamro, which the European Medicines Agency rejected in 2012 and the FDA approved in 2013, Wikipedia says.

The partnership that made its name was with Biogen. Nusinersen, discovered in a collaboration between Adrian Krainer at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Isis, was developed with Biogen from 2012; Biogen took an exclusive licence in 2015, and the FDA approved the drug, as Spinraza, for spinal muscular atrophy in December 2016, according to Wikipedia. Biogen sells it.

Other approvals followed: Tegsedi in 2018, and Wainua and Qalsody in 2023, Wikipedia says. In 2017 the company spun its cardiovascular programmes into a separate company, Akcea, and bought it back in 2020; in 2021 it agreed with AstraZeneca to develop and sell eplontersen, and in 2022 it took its first step into gene editing through a partnership with Metagenomi.

Wikipedia describes the company’s range today as antisense medicines alongside RNA interference and CRISPR work, and says it developed most of the key antisense patents, many of the earliest of which have now expired.

How biotech presents itself.

Biotechnology companies sell things that are almost impossible to photograph. A medicine made from a strand of RNA or an engineered antibody has no shape a camera can see, so the sector leans on a small set of stand-in images: rendered molecules, ribbons and double helices, antibodies drawn as glowing Y-shapes, and close-ups of cells under a microscope. These macro images carry most of the visual weight on corporate websites, investor decks and annual reports.

The second familiar picture is the laboratory itself. Scientists at benches with pipettes, racks of sample tubes and gloved hands over a plate reader appear again and again, because they show work in progress rather than a finished product. Alongside them sit patient-advocacy portraits: people living with a rare disease, their families and the groups that represent them, photographed in everyday settings rather than in the clinic.

Architecture does the rest. Glass-fronted lab campuses in clusters such as Cambridge, Massachusetts, Copenhagen and South San Francisco stand in for scale and ambition, and company websites often show their buildings alongside their people. The calendar adds its own stage: the BIO International Convention and the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, held each January in San Francisco, are where pipelines are presented to partners and investors.

Within that common language, names and colours do much of the work of telling companies apart. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, where it is based, what it makes and what has happened to it — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. No product, logo or pack is reproduced, and the palettes are our own unofficial interpretation.

A new name, a pyramid logo and its own launches.

The name changed on 18 December 2015, when Isis Pharmaceuticals became Ionis Pharmaceuticals. The Associated Press reported that day that the company, which shared a name with the Islamic State group, had changed it after resisting for some time: a company spokeswoman said the old name had become a distraction, with media questions arriving whenever the group was in the news, and that staff safety was also a concern because its scientists travel widely. The company had said in 2014 that it would not change its name, and had discussed the change for about two years, the AP reported.

The company’s own announcement put it differently. Its press release of the same day called Ionis, pronounced “eye-OH-nis,” an original name chosen to represent its culture and its heritage in RNA-targeted medicines, and its chief operating officer, Lynne Parshall, said the company wanted people to think of the medicines it was developing when they heard its name. The Nasdaq ticker changed from ISIS to IONS on 22 December 2015, the website moved to a new address, and the AP noted a slightly different pyramid logo.

In 2019 Crooke moved from chief executive to chairman and Brett Monia became chief executive, Wikipedia says, with a plan to rely less on partners and sell more medicines itself. In December 2024 the FDA approved olezarsen, sold as Tryngolza, for the rare genetic condition familial chylomicronemia syndrome, which Wikipedia calls the first drug Ionis brought to market itself rather than through a partner; Dawnzera followed in 2025. In September 2026, Pharmaceutical Technology reported, the FDA approved zilganersen, to be sold in the US as Zanvastro, for the rare neurological disorder Alexander disease.

For a design guide, Ionis shows how a company can keep its history and its symbol while changing the word on the door. Compare Alnylam, another RNA-focused company, and Biogen, its partner on Spinraza. For this guide we use a deep indigo, a coral and a pale lilac with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Ionis’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.