Revolutionary technologies, including methods of 3D printing, change the face of health every day.

From new artificial hearts to robotic limbs - an arsenal of technologies for saving human life and increasing its quality every year is becoming wider.

One of the areas that in the near future can change 3D printing is pharmaceutical production.

The average American brings to the pharmacy 12 recipes each year. Almost 100% of prescription drugs in the United States are mass-produced drugs that are manufactured by pharmaceutical companies. Preparations of mass production have the most different colors, but the assortment of their forms, to put it mildly, is not impressive.

Although for many, the shape and size of the pill seem to be unimportant, in fact, these factors can greatly affect the effect of the drug, primarily on its pharmacokinetics. Although the one-size-fits-all approach has worked for decades, the future of pharmaceutical production is personalization.

Researchers from the School of Pharmacy of University College London (UCL) and the company FabRx Ltd recently published an article entitled "The effect of geometry on the release of drugs from tablets printed on a 3D printer". In this article, they talked about creating tablets with improved properties using 3D printing and hot extrusion (extrusion).

"The future of the pharmaceutical industry is likely to lie far away from the mass production of tablets / capsules with several standard doses. It will be an extemporaneous, personalized production of a wide range of dosage forms at any dose suitable for a particular patient, "writes Dr. Alvaro Goyanes, one of the creators of the new technology.

Scientists have named factors that, in their opinion, will push the whole world towards a transition from mass to individual production of drugs: Distribution of drugs with low doses of active substances Narrow therapeutic index of certain drugs (eg, anticoagulants) Increasing the role of pharmacogenomics (especially for oncological diseases) The need for unique combinations of medicinal substances "In order to meet new challenges, the pharmaceutical industry must study and introduce new production technologies dstva. One of these technologies is 3D printing, "they say..

For their technology, scientists applied the hot extrusion method in which a drug substance is dissolved in a thermoplastic polymer (in this case polyvinyl alcohol, PVA) and then squeezed out like ink for a printer, forming from this mass a tablet of all possible shapes. Their goal was to create tablets of a unique shape with specified properties that can not be produced by traditional pressing.

When choosing the optimal form for the dissolution of tablets, scientists used the software AutoCAD 2014. With the help of this program, they selected geometric shapes with a certain ratio of surface area to volume.

Tests on the solubility of the obtained tablets (paracetamol, 500 mg) showed that the geometry really affects the release of the drug substance, and therefore the effect of the drug.

With the same surface area of ??tablets with paracetamol, the fastest release was in pyramidal tablets, then (in descending order) in toroidal, cubic, spherical and cylindrical.

Accordingly, pyramidal tablets have the largest ratio of surface area to volume, and for cylindrical tablets - the smallest.

"Kinetics depends on the ratio of the surface area to the volume of the tablet. Using 3D printers, you can produce tablets that meet the needs of any patient. For example, patient A needs a medicine with a quick action, and patient B with a very slow. For patient A, we will make pyramidal tablets, and for patient B, cylindrical tablets will be most suitable, "the researchers explain..

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