3D printing of dosage forms

3D-printers have recently become very affordable and widespread, and they have been found very interesting also in pharmaceutical manufacturing. The method enables unforeseen possibilities in modifying the properties of a drug product, such as the manufacturing of products with very different sizes and shapes and for example printing of dosage units with layered structures. From the point of view of personalized medicine (i.e. precision medicine), 3D-printing is a very interesting option, because solid dosage forms with customized API loads can be easily prepared, several APIs can be loaded in one dosage unit, and the possibilities to modify the release of API are far wider than currently.
The research at pharmaceutical technology focuses on exploiting FDM (Fused Deposit Modeling) in tablet manufacturing. Filament manufacturing is among the key topics; Filaments can be prepared for example via hot melt extrusion or diluting API into a commercially available filament. The filaments and 3D-printed tablets are studied with dissolution tests and different methods suitable for analyzing the solid state of materials, such as differential scanning calorimetry.