With architects printing plastic houses, fashion designers printing dresses and food companies printing hamburgers, the hype around 3D printing can often seem like a novelty. But news that the world’s first 3D-printed drug has just been approved suggests that, beyond the realm of personalized plastic trinkets, the technology still has a huge amount to offer.
While 3D printing has already been embraced in other medical fields – from printing new jawbones in facial reconstruction to custom-shaped teeth and other dental implants, as well as producing personalized prosthetics – this is the first time the technology has been approved for the production of drugs.
Developed by an Ohio-based pharmaceutical company is a new drug called Spritam which is used to control seizures brought on by epilepsy. Approved by the US Food and Drug Administration last week, it employs the company’s trademark ZipDose technology, which uses a specialized 3D printer to create a more porous pill. And so, its structure means the pill dissolves more quickly on contact with liquid, making it much easier to swallow high doses than a conventional tablet.
For the last 50 years, medication was manufactured in factories and shipped to hospitals. For the first time, this process means that the drug industry can produce tablet medication much closer to the original patient. By making slight adjustments to the software before printing, hospitals could adjust doses for individual patients, a process of personalization that is otherwise been way too expensive.
The 3D printing process also allows layers of medication to be packaged more tightly in precise dosages, and it points to a future of more personalized medicine. 3D-printed pills could be custom-ordered, based on specific patient needs, rather than on a one-drug-fits-all approach.
Researchers have also been developing a technique to 3D-print pills in different shapes, from pyramids to doughnuts, using a technique known as hot melt extrusion. The different forms, which would be hard to manufacture using standard production techniques, release drugs at different rates. Research has found that the rate of drug release is dependent not on surface area, but on the surface area-to-volume ratio. Therefore, a pyramid-shaped pill, for example, releases a drug slower than a cube or a sphere, allowing the absorption of the medication to be controlled a lot more.
While the Spritam pill similarly uses 3D printing primarily to change the physical structure of the pill, other researchers have been working on how the technology could be used to develop new drugs at a much smaller, molecular level.
It looks like researchers have been working on a chemical computer technically called a chemputer, a sort of 3D-printing chemistry set, which can be programmed to make chemical reactions and produce different molecules which would lead to sometime in near future where patients will be able to download the “ingredients” for their drugs from their computer and print them at home with their own 3-D printer.
