Pharma market demands

The pharmaceutical market is a major one for packaging printers of all kinds. Pharmaceuticals were one of the product categories that performed well throughout the global economic crisis of 2007-08, and consumption rates are on the rise in developing and newly-emerged markets such as India, China, South America and across the Asia-Pacific region. Demand for pharmaceuticals in the developed markets of Europe, North America and Japan will remain strong well into the 21st Century, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Rules and regulations

With the growth of the pharmaceutical industry, the potential for misuse, accidental misdosing, counterfeiting, and other illegal and potentially life-threatening activities has also increased. Bart Vansteenkiste, EU life sciences sector manager at Domino Printing Sciences, says falsified and counterfeit medications are a particular concern. ‘It is a bigger problem than consumers realize as it is not only prescription treatments and drugs that are being counterfeited, but also home remedies and everyday medications like aspirin.’

Online sales are an area of increasing concern. The WHO states that in over 50 percent of cases, medicines purchased over the internet from sites that conceal their physical address are counterfeits.

The EU’s Falsified Medicines Directive, which came into effect last year, introduced harmonized, pan-European measures to ensure that medicines are safe and that the trade in medicines is rigorously controlled. The main features include: an obligatory authenticity feature on the outer packaging of medicines; a common, EU-wide logo to identify legal online pharmacies; tougher rules on the control and inspection of producers of active pharmaceutical ingredients; and strengthened record-keeping requirements for wholesale distributors.