EXC 2075: Printing personalised medicines on demand: PrintMed Plus

Special groups of patients cannot use standard medication that is produced in a one-size-fits-all manner. So, there is an urgent need for producing personalized tablets whose strength can be tuned for each individual patient (depending on age, weight, health conditions, and other complications). Additive manufacturing technologies, like printing, have a tremendous potential to change the field of personalized medicine. In particular, inkjet printing enables rapid and accurate dispensing of drug-containing inks, thus enabling tailored production of personalized medicine with individual doses and a non-traditional format.

The major advantages of this technology are the simplicity, flexibility, precision, accuracy, and high speed. In the ERC-PoC project PrintMed, a first version of a porous tablet, with characteristics that are suitable for printing applications, was developed. Through an extensive set of designed experiments, tableting methodology and its key parameters were determined and a dual-porosity-based medical grade tablet was made. The tablet was able to absorb the dispensed liquid within an acceptable timeframe. For printing purposes, a single-dispenser setup was made, which was able to print a specific pattern on the tablet. As a proof of concept, which was the aim of PoC project, Clonidine active medical ingredient (API) was printed into the tablet. The drug release studies yield an adequate release time of less than 15 minutes.

In PrintMed Plus project, the research will be extended to achieve three main goals:

1) developing a tool/procedure to determine the best tableting procedure (including the composition of powder) for a selected list of APIs that most urgently need personalize dosages.

2) Pore-scale modeling results generated in PrintMed project will be used to build a continuum-scale modeling tool that is able to predict the penetration of API in the entire tablet (if possible, including evaporation).

3) Building an EU-based consortium to prepare and submit a proposal to the EU transition call.

Prof. dr. ir. Majid Hassanizadeh
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Rainer Helmig
Prof. Oliver Röhrle (PhD)

Mathis Kelm
Rana Mahmoudiandarvishani
Maziar Veyskarami

07.2023 - 06.2024