The invisible half of the drug label

The prescription didn’t change. The patient’s reaction says otherwise.

Same drug, same dose, different manufacturer. The dyes, binders, and preservatives can all change. ExciIQ makes the inactive ingredients in every FDA-labeled medication visible, comparable, and searchable. It is built for licensed pharmacists and physicians.

Professional use only — not for patient diagnosis or treatment decisions.

Excipients are the blind spot of medication review.

Patients react to inactive ingredients: dyes, gluten, lactose, preservatives, binders. Finding the culprit across a multi-drug regimen is manual label archaeology. The answer is buried across hundreds of thousands of public FDA labels. The same drug can differ by manufacturer and even by strength.

92.8%

of oral medications contain at least one inactive ingredient linked to allergic reactions.

Science Translational Medicine, 2019

8.8

inactive ingredients in the average oral medication. 45% contain lactose, and 33% contain a chemical dye associated with allergic reactions.

Science Translational Medicine, 2019

28%

of active ingredients have even one marketed formulation that avoids every flagged allergen. For the rest, there is no fully clean substitute.

Science Translational Medicine, 2019

The ground keeps moving. The National Library of Medicine retired Pillbox, its public pill-identification database, in 2021 with no replacement. In 2025 the FDA banned FD&C Red No. 3, and drug formulations will keep changing through 2028. We built ExciIQ to end the archaeology.

Built for clinicians whose names go on the decision.

See the whole regimen’s excipient load.

Assemble a patient’s medications into a private workspace. ExciIQ shows every excipient across the regimen, with per-excipient daily and weekly intake totals and a regimen-wide comparison matrix. A workspace is identified by a memorable session code, gender, and derived age. That is the complete list: no names, no birthdates, no record numbers. ExciIQ never holds patient data.

Turn “we don’t know why” into a shortlist.

Sort the patient’s medications into tolerated Friends and reaction-associated Foes. ExciIQ lists the suspect excipients that appear only in the Foes. When a suspect appears in every Foe, it is flagged as a Top Suspect. Save the workup and pick it up where you left off.

Alternatives you can defend.

Choose the excipients to avoid. ExciIQ finds therapeutic equivalents and gives each one of three honest verdicts: safe, contains the avoided excipient, or uncertain. Uncertain is never dressed up as safe. That distinction is the whole point.

A label database that admits what it doesn’t know.

Every record carries provenance: where it came from and its review status. When a drug’s coded ingredient list disagrees with its written label text, ExciIQ shows you the difference side by side, in plain language. Every claim sits one click from its FDA label record. “Not yet reviewed” is always distinct from “reviewed, nothing found”. A clinician’s trust has to be earned on every record, not claimed once.

The reference desk for inactive ingredients.

Look up any excipient and get a working reference card: identifiers, functions, cautions, and which products contain it. Search medications by name or NDC. Identify pills by imprint, color, and shape. Read the structured FDA label without wading through the raw document.

Precise to the product on the shelf.

The same drug can carry different excipients by manufacturer and even by strength. ExciIQ keeps its analysis at the level of the specific product in the bottle. A 20 mg tablet’s dye list can’t answer a question about the 40 mg.

Professional use only — not for patient diagnosis or treatment decisions.

See how pharmacists and physicians put ExciIQ to work →

Coverage

Prescription. Over-the-counter.

If the FDA labels it for people, ExciIQ covers it. That means the full public FDA human labeling corpus, at the same product-and-strength precision. We plan to load FDA’s animal labeling in Q4 2026.

Built for the veterinary side of the counter, too →

Trust, then verify

Nothing to breach. Nothing to hide.

ExciIQ holds no patient data, by architecture, not policy. Regimens live under a memorable session code with gender and derived age only. Sign-in is passwordless. The honesty extends to the data itself. Every record carries provenance. ExciIQ shows disagreements instead of smoothing them over. Every claim sits one click from its FDA label record. Even our alerts are marigold yellow, not red. They are designed to inform your judgment, never to alarm it.

Professional use only — not for patient diagnosis or treatment decisions.

How we earn trust →

Three ways in.

Help shape ExciIQ

We’re onboarding a small founding cohort of compounding, community, and hospital pharmacists and physicians. That includes allergists, immunologists, and any specialty caring for patients with sensitivities. You bring the real cases; we build to them. You get a direct line to the founder.

Join the pilot

Fifteen minutes, no pitch

One regimen, no slides. We walk a workup on common over-the-counter examples. We show you what it looks like when the honest answer is “uncertain.” Your own case is the first thing we do together once you’re in the pilot.

Book fifteen minutes

The Invisible Half

The Invisible Half is a short, occasional email on the half of the label nobody reads. It covers excipient awareness for pharmacy and medical professionals. Expect plain language and public-knowledge examples, in the same honest voice.

Subscribe

For patients

A companion for patients is on the way.

ExciIQ is built for licensed professionals, and that will not change. For patients, we are building a separate product: WhatsInYourMeds. It will show every ingredient a medication’s FDA label lists, in plain language, including the inactive ones. Patients will build their own medication list and bring better questions to their next doctor visit. Look for it in early fall 2026.

Want to know when it’s ready?

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