Inkjet printing platform for fabrication of uniform, excipient-free drug particles for pulmonary delivery in a preclinical setting

Three-dimensional printed personalized drug devices with anatomical fit: a review

OBJECTIVES

Three-dimensional printing (3DP) has opened the era of drug personalization, promising to revolutionize the pharmaceutical field with improvements in efficacy, safety and compliance of the treatments. As a result of these investigations, a vast therapeutic field has opened for 3DP-loaded drug devices with an anatomical fit. Along these lines, innovative dosage forms, unimaginable until recently, can be obtained. This review explores 3DP-engineered drug devices described in recent research articles, as well as in patented inventions, and even devices already produced by 3DP with drug-loading potential.

KEY FINDINGS

3D drug-loaded stents, implants and prostheses are reviewed, along with devices produced to fit hard-to-attach body parts such as nasal masks, vaginal rings or mouthguards. The most promising 3DP techniques for such devices and the complementary technologies surrounding these inventions are also discussed, particularly the scanners useful for mapping body parts. Health regulatory concerns regarding the new use of such technology are also analysed.

SUMMARY

The scenario discussed in this review shows that for wearable 3DP drug devices to become a tangible reality to users, it will be necessary to overcome the existing regulatory barriers, create new interfaces with electronic systems and improve the mapping mechanisms of body surfaces.

Randomly Induced Phase Transformation in Silk Protein-Based Microlaser Arrays for Anticounterfeiting

Anticounterfeiting labels based on physical unclonable functions (PUFs) exhibit high security with unreplicable code outputs, making them an ideal platform to realize unbreakable anticounterfeiting. Although various schemes are proposed for PUF labels, the utilization of natural randomness suffers from unpredictable signal extraction sites, which poses a challenge to efficient and convenient authentication for practical anticounterfeiting applications. Here, a covert optical PUF-based cryptographic protocol from silk protein-based microlaser (SML) arrays that possess hidden randomness of lasers for unclonable lasing signals as well as a defined location for efficient identification is proposed. The initial SMLs are patterned by casting laser dye-doped regenerated silk fibroin solution, resulting in a uniform microlaser array with regulated positions. With the SML array as substrate, random methanol microdroplets are stochastically sprayed on the SML array, which eventually induces uneven lasing signal changes of the patterned microlasers. The treated SML array possesses the deterministic readout sites of laser signals and unrepeatable signal distribution characteristics, which can guarantee efficient authentication and high security when serving as an anticounterfeiting label.

Inkjet printing of small molecules, biologics, and nanoparticles

During the last decades, inkjet printing has emerged as a novel technology and attracted the attention of the pharmaceutical industry, as a potential method for manufacturing personalized and customizable dosage forms to deliver drugs. Commonly, the desired drug is dissolved or dispersed within the ink and then dispensed in various dosage forms. Using this approach, several studies have been conducted to load hydrophilic or poorly water-soluble small molecules onto the surface of different solid substrates, including films, tablets, microneedles, and smart data-enriched edible pharmaceuticals, using two-dimensional and three-dimensional inkjet printing methods, with high dose accuracy and reproducibility. Furthermore, biological drugs, such as peptides, proteins, growth factors, and plasmids, have also been evaluated with positive results, eliciting the expected biological response; nonetheless, minor changes in the structure of these compounds with significant impaired activity cannot be dismissed. Another strategy using inkjet printing is to disperse drug-loaded nanoscale particles in the ink liquid, such as nanosuspension, nanocomplexes, or nanoparticles, which have been explored with promising results. Although these favorable outcomes, the proper selection of ink constituents and the inkjet printer, the correlation of printing cycles and effectively printed doses, the stability studies of drugs within the ink and the optimal analysis of samples before and after the printing process are the main challenges for inkjet printing, and therefore, this review analyzes these aspects to assess the body of current literature and help to guide future investigations on this field.