Pharmaceutical & Life Sciences

The drivers impacting the pharmaceutical and life sciences industry worldwide are daunting, and include patent expiration and anticipated revenue loss, shrinking new-product pipelines, growing international competition, increased oversight of drug safety fewer drugs being approved, the growing importance and influence of generic-drug companies and aging populations that are living longer.

To deal with these challenges, there likely will be considerable M&A consolidation, with more buyers emerging from outside the U.S. This in itself will present corporate branding challenges. But cost-costing measures by themselves won't cure what ails the industry. Most major pharmaceutical companies have set a goal of increasing the number of NCEs (New Chemical Entities) to three a year. However, healthcare already has trouble keeping pace with the rate of scientific discovery, which is fast increasing thanks to advances in genomics. Thus the key issue for innovation-led companies will be how to get new products out of the laboratory and into the marketplace more quickly and efficiently.

Schawk offers a diverse range of services to help accelerate time to market that include strategic design to improve labeling and reduce medical error; technology solutions that help streamline workflows while maintaining rigorous privacy, accountability and record-keeping requirements and the execution of packaging artwork.

Typically, in this industry, the business need is for a workflow model that will deliver both cost savings and a standardized best practice approach. In the search for a strategic partner to deliver this service pharmaceutical companies require a provider who can demonstrate the highest levels of quality assurance combined with the capacity to deliver high volumes of production art and modifications such as those driven by pan-regional product launches.
Schawk is finding that increasingly, global pharmaceutical companies are looking to outsource the development of packaging artwork. Many of these Pharma giants have traditionally managed the production art process within the secure environment of their own internal graphics teams. More and more, they are looking at packaging artwork as a non-core activity that can be outsourced.

To make the transition from controlling artwork development in-house to engaging an external business partner represents a huge cultural shift for these risk-averse, defect-intolerant organizations. In response to this, Schawk has established Life Sciences teams throughout the world who are GMP-trained and dedicated to working on Life Sciences accounts. These teams are comprised of professionals who have knowledge and experience in the highly-regulated environments of pharmaceutical and life sciences industry.
Every day, Schawk helps pharmaceutical companies create compelling and consistent brand experiences while accelerating time-to-market for new product introductions.