3D Printing Manufacture of Medicines
Clive Roberts,
,
University Of Nottingham
The processes used to produce tablets, the dominant form of medicine taken by patients, have changed relatively little for over a century. Whilst these approaches serve the industry and patients very well they remain limited in some clinical areas and cannot create complex dosage forms or bespoke medications tailored for an individual or sub-population (ie personalised medicines). This would be valuable in meeting therapeutic challenges and the need for personalized medicines. 3D printing, offers a possible route to address these issues. I will show tablets produced using extrusion and ink-jet methods and amongst other examples, a 5-drug polypill and tablets with novel 3D architecture designed to control drug release. The potential and challenges for using 3DP in the manufacture of medicines and to provide new opportunities for clinical practice will be discussed as well as the considerable challenges that must be met to satisfy scale-up issues and regulatory requirements. I aim to show that 3D printing has already shown the capacity to meet some regulatory requirements and whilst many challenges remain this is a technology that could potentially benefit patients and radically alter the way we make and distribute some medicines.
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