Among the reasons for this surge is an increasing demand for pharmaceutical products overall, which in turn is at least partially attributed to growing geriatric population. That’s easy math:more people needing more medicine means more labels. However, an aging population might be the only simplistic factor in pharma labeling’s consistent uptick.

While the worldwide supply chain gets more interconnected, expansive and diverse, novel and highly sophisticated formulations stream through the approval pipeline, onto the production floor and into the market. Meanwhile, regulations continue to be adopted, adapted and strengthened across a wide variety of regions, often in disparate, inconsistent fashions. Newmarkets, new drugs and new rules combine to make the manufacturing and packaging processes exponentially more intricate, as the amount of information a medicine must communicate to pharmacists and end users expands despite limited packaging print space.Considering this, it’s no wonder that one of the niches helping to drive pharma labeling’s global growth is a solution that addresses each of these issues with room to spare: Extended ContentLabels (ECLs).

Utilized in various facets of pharmaceutical packaging, they can range from as few as two pages to full-fledged booklets of up to 60 pages, which are more typically used for clinical trials and prescription drug packaging. The overarching benefit of ECLs is space consolidation.

You can do a lot with a little, as flip book and fold-out styles allow print space to be multiplied several times over while taking up a little more total space than the surface of an ordinary label.The result is ample room for a lengthy list of mounting mandatory information, including:

• Warnings and directives that comply with regulatory guidelines, often across multiple nations or trade regions.
• Serialization and traceability requirements.
• Different languages for both international and domestic customers. For example, Canada needs labels in English and French, while in the US, Spanish is quickly becoming an unofficial second national language.
• Specific, detailed instructions. More and more prescription pharmaceuticals require strict adherence regimens, which in turn necessitate detailed printed instructions for doctors, pharmacists, and end users.Relatedly, clinical trials often need tight control, another condition that lends itself to more labeling content rather than less.