What if you could combine all your pills into one? With 3D printing it is possible

Researchers are launching a new technique that demonstrates that pills can be designed individually for each individual patient.

Look at the photo above: objects beautiful at first sight, with their faceted and intertwined surfaces, with plays of light like decorated jewels. But they are not jewels. They are, in fact, pills made with the help of the most advanced technology. These tablets are handmade, tailored for one person, to save you from filling an entire drawer with pills.

Developed by researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA)

these pills represent an innovation in 3D printing. Today they are produced in laboratories. However, scientists predict that in the future they will be produced directly by the pharmacist or directly in the hospital. This means that, over time, patients will be able to abandon classic recipes and will no longer have to worry about strictly observing different intake times for different pills.

“If patients can take a pill once a day, it is much easier for them to adhere to the treatment,” says Sheng Qi, coordinating professor of the study. In fact, the mental burden of taking multiple medications a day can be overwhelming to the point that people stop taking them.

According to Qi, research into 3D medicine has taken off over the past five years in hopes of solving this very problem. Both academic institutions and private companies are studying how to produce pills differently. Traditional pills are made of powdered medications that are crushed under high pressure to stabilize them into a pill. But 3D printing could compress drugs layer by layer, specially shaping and mixing each layer so that one drug can be released quickly while another releases slowly. The pills are the same size as standard pills. This idea turns out to have potential and refers to the creation of a pill that the body doesn’t actually digest. Instead, it is made of medical-grade plastic, a plastic used in medical implants, which is easily obtained in additive manufacturing, but which is not digestible. So far, no such pill has received approval.

More recent research shows, however, how 3D pills can completely change pharmaceutical manufacturing. Instead of relying on this indigestible plastic, the pill is molded with a finely powdered medicine (which is stabilized, like many pills you take, by a polymer that your body can digest). The 3D printer extrudes drugs layer by layer to create multiple layers of drugs in a single pill.

Because it is 3D printed and not pressed

the pill can have any shape. “We tried using the geometric design, the porosity, to see if we could just use the design to adjust the speed [absorbției]» says Qi. Essentially, if the drugs were molded into a more spongy structure with more holes, we would have more surface area open to gastric juices in the stomach, which would break them down faster. If they were molded into a firmer structure with fewer pores, they would take longer to dissolve.

The above idea worked, and with clear and measurable results. Using a hollow structure containing only 20% drug by volume and the rest air, the pill dissolved in just 12 minutes. By changing this ratio so that 80% of the pill is drug and 20% air, it takes more than two hours to dissolve.

Things get more interesting when these microstructures can be mixed and matched in a pill: basically we have alternating layers of different drugs that dissolve at different rates.

Next steps? In the United States, the FDA works with the National Institute of Standards and Technology to establish the protocol for 3D printing pills or including cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence in the pharmaceutical field.

“We’re trying to get the pharmaceutical industry involved,” Qi says. «Its role will be completely changed. They will no longer make big, one-size-fits-all tablets.» Instead, big pharmaceutical companies would sell a new type of 3D printing filament, the basic ingredient for a prescription. One of the advantages of this approach is that today’s complicated treatments can be greatly simplified.