Word.ws English Dictionary

orphan drug

orphan drug noun: a medicinal drug which is effective in the treatment of some disease(s), but which is not manufactured or marketed because the demand is insufficient to cover the costs of supply.

Noun

orphan drug (plural orphan drugs)

  1. A medicinal drug which is effective in the treatment of some disease(s), but which is not manufactured or marketed because the demand is insufficient to cover the costs of supply.
    • Tragically, her disease is so rare that the only effective medicine is an orphan drug.
  2. (US) A drug as defined under the Orphan Drug Act (1983).

orphan drug meaning in Vietnamese

orphan drug in Vietnamese

Translations
thuốc mồ côi

Forms of orphan drug

pluralorphan drugs

Questions about orphan drug

What does orphan drug mean?
Orphan drug means a medicinal drug which is effective in the treatment of some disease(s), but which is not manufactured or marketed because the demand is insufficient to cover the costs of supply.
What is orphan drug in Vietnamese?
Orphan drug in Vietnamese is thuốc mồ côi. See Orphan drug meaning in Vietnamese.
What part of speech is orphan drug?
Orphan drug is a noun.
What is the plural of orphan drug?
The plural of orphan drug is orphan drugs.

Words near orphan drug in the dictionary

  1. orphan asylums
  2. orphan crushing machine
  3. orphan crushing machines
  4. orphan disease
  5. orphan diseases
  6. orphan drug
  7. orphan drugs
  8. orphan house
  9. orphan houses
  10. orphan initialism
  11. orphan initialisms

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: orphan drug (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “orphan drug.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/orphan_drug. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.