Customized medicines could one day be manufactured to patients’ individual needs, with University of East Anglia (UEA) researchers investigating technology to 3D print pills.

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The team, including Andy Gleadall and Richard Bibb at Loughborough University, identified a new additive manufacturing method to allow the 3D printing of medicine in highly porous structures, which can be used to regulate the rate of drug release from the medicine to the body when taken orally. Sheng Qi, a professor at UEA’s School of Pharmacy, led the research.

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The project findings are published in the International Journal of Pharmaceutics . “Currently our medicines are manufactured in ‘one-size-fits-all’ fashion,” said Qi. “Personalized medicine uses new manufacturing technology to produce pills that have the accurate dose and drug combinations tailored to individual patients. This would allow the patients to get maximal drug benefit with minimal side effects. Such treatment approaches can particularly benefit elderly patients who often have to take many different types of medicines per day, and patients with complicated conditions such as cancer, mental illness and inflammatory bowel disease.” The team’s work, Qi said, is building the foundation for the technology needed in future to produce personalized medicine at the point-of-care. She said […]

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