92.8%
of 42,052 oral solid dosage forms studied contained at least one of 38 inactive ingredients reported to cause allergic symptoms after oral exposure.
The invisible half of the drug label
The prescription didn’t change. The patient’s reaction says otherwise.
ExciIQ makes the inactive ingredients in every FDA-labeled human medication visible, comparable, and searchable. Same drug, same dose, different manufacturer. The dyes, binders, and preservatives can all change.
ExciIQ is built for licensed physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, pharmacists, and registered dietitians.
Excipient-Safe Alternatives
Source drug
Example tablet 10 mg
Excipients to avoid
FD&C Red No. 40
Therapeutic equivalents
-
Example tablet 10 mg Avoids selected excipients (current label)
-
Example tablet 10 mg Contains: FD&C Red No. 40
-
Example tablet 10 mg Can’t confirm
The label data doesn’t let us say either way.
Excipients are the blind spot of medication review.
Patients react to inactive ingredients: dyes, gluten, lactose, preservatives, binders. Tracing an inactive ingredient across a multi-drug regimen is manual label archaeology. The answer is buried across hundreds of thousands of public FDA labels. Dietary supplements list inactive ingredients too, on labels the NIH catalogs in its Dietary Supplement Label Database.
8.8
inactive ingredients in the average oral medication. 45% contain lactose, and 33% contain a chemical dye associated with allergic reactions.
0 of 6
A drug label states its inactive ingredients twice: once as a coded list, once in the written text. Of FDA’s six automated checks specific to the coded list, none compares it with the ingredients the text names.
FDA, SPL Implementation Guide with Validation Procedures, December 2023
28%
of active ingredients have at least one available formulation that avoids all 38 potential allergens the study tracked.
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 who own the workup.
Review a regimen
See the whole regimen’s excipient load.
Dose Cup is ExciIQ’s regimen workspace. It lists every excipient across a patient’s medications. Dose Cup counts how many times a day the patient takes each excipient, across every medication. It also shows weekly totals and a regimen-wide comparison matrix.
Work up a reaction
Turn “we don’t know why” into a shortlist.
Sort the patient’s medications into tolerated Friends and reaction-associated Foes. ExciIQ turns that sort into a list of suspect excipients and flags the Top Suspects among them.
Read the workup guide →Avoid an excipient
Equivalents checked against the excipients you avoid.
Each therapeutic equivalent gets one of three verdicts: avoids the selected excipients per the current FDA label, contains one, or can’t confirm.
What “can’t confirm” means →Precise to the product. ExciIQ answers for the specific product in the bottle. A 20 mg tablet’s dye list can’t answer a question about the 40 mg.
A reference desk for inactive ingredients. ExciIQ’s excipient research cites more than 3,000 PubMed articles on more than 350 excipients. More than 9 in 10 medication products on current FDA labels contain at least one of the excipients that research covers. Look up excipients, search medications, identify pills →
Coverage
What ExciIQ covers
Prescription
FDA drug labels for people, at the level of the specific product and strength.
Over-the-counter
FDA drug labels for nonprescription medicines, at the same product-and-strength precision.
Dietary supplements
ExciIQ carries dietary supplement labels from the NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database (DSLD), kept separate from FDA drug labels. Look up an excipient to see which supplements list it, shown apart from the medications that contain it.
Label information as transcribed by the NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database (DSLD). Dietary supplements are not reviewed by FDA for safety or effectiveness before they are sold.
If the FDA labels it for people, ExciIQ covers it. That means the full public FDA human labeling corpus. ExciIQ checks DailyMed for new and updated labels every week. We plan to load FDA’s animal labeling in Q4 2026.
Veterinary practices: how ExciIQ helps →Trust, then verify
Nothing to breach. Nothing to hide.
ExciIQ holds no patient-identifying data, by architecture, not policy. Each regimen is saved under a short code, not the patient’s name. Its only other details are a gender and a birth year, shown as an age. Sign-in is passwordless.
The honesty extends to the data itself. Every record carries provenance. When a drug’s coded ingredient list disagrees with its written label text, ExciIQ shows the difference side by side. Every drug claim sits one click from its FDA label record. When ExciIQ has no research profile for an excipient, it says “No research profile.” A missing flag is never presented as an all-clear. Even our alerts are marigold yellow, not red. They are designed to inform your judgment, never to alarm it.
How we earn trust →Not ready to apply?
The Invisible Half
A short, occasional email on the half of the label nobody reads: the inactive ingredients. It covers excipient awareness for medical and pharmacy professionals. Expect plain language and public-knowledge examples, in the same honest voice as the product.
SubscribeReady for more? Join the pilot → Book fifteen minutes →
For patients
Private preview
WhatsInYourMeds, a separate app for patients.
ExciIQ is built for licensed professionals, and that will not change. For patients, we built a separate product: WhatsInYourMeds.
Patients add their medicines and supplements at home, with the bottle in front of them. They see the ingredients each label lists, in plain language, including the inactive ones. They find a medicine by name, by the NDC on the pharmacy label or box, or by the imprint on the pill. They find a supplement by its name or brand, or by the number under its barcode.
They can let someone they trust view the list as it changes, or send their care team a copy. A care team opens that copy in ExciIQ, and later changes to the patient’s list don’t reach it. For a provider who doesn’t use ExciIQ, the patient can download a PDF of the list and give it to them.
- Patient’s list In WhatsInYourMeds
- A copy As it is when sent
- Care team Opens it in ExciIQ
Invitation-only for now.
Leave your email and we’ll tell you when you can start.
Got it. We’ll email you when WhatsInYourMeds launches.
We couldn’t reach our server just now, so your email app should have opened with a note pre-filled. Press send there, or write to hello@exciiq.com directly.