Inkjet Pharmacy: On-demand Drugs from the Printer

By Ulrike Keller In the near future, orodispersible films could replace pills: scientists at the Research Center Pharmaceutical Engineering are developing printing technologies to create personalized dosage forms for individual patient needs on demand. "Would you print out this prescription?" In the future, pharmacists could hear this question more frequently and could react in a different way than we would expect today. Instead of handing the patient a pack of tablets over the counter, the pharmacist could load a cartridge filled with a drug solution into an inkjet printer. Patterns of the medication would be carefully printed on a paper-like film made of starch or other digestible materials, which dissolves in the mouth and releases the active substance. Tailored drug therapies. According to experts at the Research Center Pharmaceutical Engineering (RCPE), this drug printing technology is not that far removed from reality. In the research project "MediPrint", researchers in Graz have laid the foundation for the first commercial drug substance printing system with a companion chemical imaging system to assess identity, quantity and distribution of the printed drug substances.