Printing revolution reaches big pharma

Printing active pharmaceutical ingredients onto pills could improve the safety and quality of medicines and revolutionise a process which has remained largely unchanged for over a thousand years.

GalxoSmithKline (GSK) has developed a technique of printing active pharmaceutical ingredients onto tablets, which may create faster acting drugs that can be bought to the market quicker. The technique can currently be applied to 0.5% of all medicines in tablet form, but researchers from the University of Leeds and Durham University hope to increase this to 40%.

“Some active ingredients can be dissolved in liquid, which then behaves like normal link, so then the process is fairly straightforward,” said Dr Nik Kapur from the faculty of engineering at Leeds, “However, when you’re working with active ingredients that don’t dissolve, the drug particles are suspended in the liquid, which creates very different properties and challenges for uses within a printing system.”

Quality control would also be improved as each tablet would contain the exact does of active ingredient, but – as medicine droplets are 20 times larger than ink droplets – researchers will be looking at how many drops each tablet can hold and how to increase the level of active ingredients in each drop. They will also need to observe the properties and behaviour of the suspension, the shape and size of the printing nozzle and ways to pump the solution through the printing equipment.

Drugs produced in this way would be faster acting; since the active ingredient is on the pill’s surface, the pill does not need to be broken down by the digestive system before the drug enters the blood stream. The technique may also allow for several drugs to be printed onto one pill, reducing the number needed to be swallowed by those with multiple medicines.