Design and production of personalised medicines via innovative 3D printing technologies

Abstract

The perspective of personalized therapies in recent years is projecting the community towards a rampant hankering for individualization of healthcare. Paramount is the necessity of re-organizing the healthcare services and the production scales to meet the expectations of patients for targeted medicine. Thus, worldwide organizations are fostering the re-centering of the development and the design of medicines on the single patient, supporting the individual-oriented research, the flexibility of manufacturing processes, and the decentralization of medicine production. All these changes in the healthcare system could improve the effectiveness of pharmaceutical treatments, leading to a reduction of the associated costs for care and enhancing patient compliance to therapeutic plans. Particularly three-dimensional printing (3DP, also known as additive manufacturing, AM) is a disruptive technology, encompassing a wide range of techniques, which is revolutionizing the perspective of pharmaceutical production, especially in the personalized medicine frame. The approval of the marketing authorization for the first 3D printed drug, SPRITAM® (Aprecia Pharmaceuticals, Langhorne, PA, USA) in 2015 has been a landmark for the application of 3DP technologies in pharmaceutical compounding. This approval reflected the interest of the pharmaceutical companies in these novel manufacturing processes and spurred the research in finding new solutions also for clinical practice. 3DP could allow targeted use of well-known drugs for subcategories of patients and can become a daily approach in pharmaceutical prescriptions. .. [Outline of the PhD project, edited by Author]