Drug discovery and design are large areas of research within chemistry. Most drug research must be conducted by highly trained organic chemists or biochemists, however, the processes are very time consuming and inaccessible to the general public who need such medicine. For most drugs, the general public must wait through a long process in which researchers design and test drugs, the FDA must approve new drugs, and then finally pharmaceutical companies can produce the drugs for sale. Regardless, the general public must go to a medical doctor for a prescription before they can even receive the produced drugs, but what if there was a way for those patients to go home with algorithms instead of prescriptions and make their own, personalized drugs? Research professor Lee Cronin hopes that this can be the future, and has been working since 2012 to research a way for people to “print their own medicine,” as he describes in the TED video below.
Cronin and his team have been working on developing a 3D printer that can print chemicals and reaction chambers. 3D chemical printers would also be equipped with testing devices so reaction progress could be monitored on computers analyzing the data from the testing devices. As of now, 3D chemical printers are of most use to pharmaceutical companies such as Aprecia Pharmaceuticals, a company that developed the drug Spritam through 3D printing methods. Spritam is easily dissolved with just a sip of water because the 3D printing methods allow it to be made to work with "Zip-Dose Technology," meaning that the drug is very porous. The high solubility of Spritam adds a benefit to this new drug production method as it allows consumers to more easily take their pills. The purpose of Spritam is to treat epileptic seizures, and it was just approved by the FDA in 2015.
Right now, it is not possible for people to have 3D chemical printers in their home. However, in just three years from the start of research there has been enough progress for an FDA approved 3D printed drug to exist. The more companies like Aprecia Pharmaceuticals and researchers like Cronin continue to work on these technologies, the more advances will be made. Once the technology becomes cheap and secure enough, is will be possible for 3D chemical printers to be as common as home computers and laptops. In the meantime, synthetic chemical researchers can use the printers for their research, as can pharmaceutical companies. It is also likely that pharmacies may be able to use printers on site, especially since pharmacists have vast training in chemistry that would allow them to quickly understanding the technology and ways to use it.
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I'm amazed at how many different industries are finding value in 3D printing. I'm sure that regulation will be difficult in this area, but the technology could definitely have lots of benefits in managing dosage and the physical structure of medications.
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