Development and analysis of a novel loading technique for FDM 3D printed systems: Microwave-assisted impregnation of gastro-retentive PVA capsular devices

3D printed dosage forms, where are we headed?

INTRODUCTION

3D Printing (3DP) is an innovative fabrication technology that has gained enormous popularity through its paradigm shifts in manufacturing in several disciplines, including healthcare. In this past decade, we have witnessed the impact of 3DP in drug product development. Almost 8 years after the first USFDA approval of the 3D printed tablet Levetiracetam (Spritam), the interest in 3DP for drug products is high. However, regulatory agencies have often questioned its large-scale industrial practicability, and 3DP drug approval/guidelines are yet to be streamlined.

AREAS COVERED

In this review, major technologies involved with the fabrication of drug products are introduced along with the prospects of upcoming technologies, including AI (Artificial Intelligence). We have touched upon regulatory updates and discussed the burning limitations, which require immediate focus, illuminating status, and future perspectives on the near future of 3DP in the pharmaceutical field.

EXPERT OPINION

3DP offers significant advantages in rapid prototyping for drug products, which could be beneficial for personalizing patient-based pharmaceutical dispensing. It seems inevitable that the coming decades will be marked by exponential growth in personalization, and 3DP could be a paradigm-shifting asset for pharmaceutical professionals.

3D-printed dosage forms for oral administration: a review

Oral administration is the most commonly used form of treatment due to its advantages, including high patient compliance, convenient administration, and minimal preparation required. However, the traditional preparation process of oral solid preparation has many defects. Although continuous manufacturing line that combined all the unit operations has been developed and preliminarily applied in the pharmaceutical industry, most of the currently used manufacturing processes are still complicated and discontinuous. As a result, these complex production steps will lead to low production efficiency and high quality control risk of the final product. Additionally, the large-scale production mode is inappropriate for the personalized medicines, which commonly is customized with small amount. Several attractive techniques, such as hot-melt extrusion, fluidized bed pelletizing and spray drying, could effectively shorten the process flow, but still, they have inherent limitations that are challenging to address. As a novel manufacturing technique, 3D printing could greatly reduce or eliminate these disadvantages mentioned above, and could realize a desirable continuous production for small-scale personalized manufacturing. In recent years, due to the participation of 3D printing, the development of printed drugs has progressed by leaps and bounds, especially in the design of oral drug dosage forms. This review attempts to summarize the new development of 3D printing technology in oral preparation and also discusses their advantages and disadvantages as well as potential applications.

Accelerating 3D printing of pharmaceutical products using machine learning

Three-dimensional printing (3DP) has seen growing interest within the healthcare industry for its ability to fabricate personalized medicines and medical devices. However, it may be burdened by the lengthy empirical process of formulation development. Active research in pharmaceutical 3DP has led to a wealth of data that machine learning could utilize to provide predictions of formulation outcomes. A balanced dataset is critical for optimal predictive performance of machine learning (ML) models, but data available from published literature often only include positive results. In this study, in-house and literature-mined data on hot melt extrusion (HME) and fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3DP formulations were combined to give a more balanced dataset of 1594 formulations. The optimized ML models predicted the printability and filament mechanical characteristics with an accuracy of 84%, and predicted HME and FDM processing temperatures with a mean absolute error of 5.5 °C and 8.4 °C, respectively. The performance of these ML models was better than previous iterations with a smaller and a more imbalanced dataset, highlighting the importance of providing a structured and heterogeneous dataset for optimal ML performance. The optimized models were integrated in an updated web-application, M3DISEEN, that provides predictions on filament characteristics, printability, HME and FDM processing temperatures, and drug release profiles (https://m3diseen.com/predictionsFDM/). By simulating the workflow of preparing FDM-printed pharmaceutical products, the web-application expedites the otherwise empirical process of formulation development, facilitating higher pharmaceutical 3DP research throughput.

User-designed device with programmable release profile for localized treatment

Three-dimensional printing enables precise and on-demand manufacture of customizable drug delivery systems to advance healthcare toward the goal of personalized medicine. However, major challenges remain in realizing personalized drug delivery that fits a patient-specific drug dosing schedule using local drug delivery systems. In this study, a user-designed device is developed as implantable therapeutics that can realize personalized drug release kinetics by programming the inner structural design on the microscale. The drug release kinetics required for various treatments, including dose-dense therapy and combination therapy, can be implemented by controlling the dosage and combination of drugs along with the rate, duration, initiation time, and time interval of drug release according to the device layer design. After implantation of the capsular device in mice, the in vitro-in vivo and pharmacokinetic evaluation of the device is performed, and the therapeutic effect of the developed device is achieved through the local release of doxorubicin. The developed user-designed device provides a novel platform for developing next-generation drug delivery systems for personalized and localized therapy.