by ecancer reporter Janet Fricker

The world’s first three dimensional (3D) printed pill, which was recently approved by the FDA, offers the potential to create personalised medicines based on the specific needs of individual cancer patients.

The technology, experts predict, will transform the pharmaceutical landscape and influence the future delivery of oncology drugs.

3D printing, widely used in the automotive and aerospace industries, creates objects layer by layer.

More recently 3D printing has been used in health care to create replicas of jaws, bespoke dental prosthetics and customised hip replacements.

Now Aprecia Pharmaceuticals, based in Blue Ash, Ohio, have used their ‘ZipDose’ Technology platform to assemble an epilepsy drug in layers to create a ‘fast-melt’ product.

Thin layers of powdered medications are spread on top of one another with patterns of liquid droplets ‘printed’ onto selected regions of each powdered layer.

The result is a product, created without using compression forces or traditional moulding techniques that disintegrates in the mouth with just a sip of liquid.

Previously Spirtam levetiracetam, a drug designed to control seizures, did not dissolve well, making it a challenge for patients to digest.

The innovation is viewed as particularly valuable for patients with dry mouths (a side effect of many cancer treatments) and swallowing disorders.

The platform could be used to allow doses to be adjusted for individual patients, or to create ‘poly pills’ combining multiple treatments so that patients did not need to remember complex drug sequences.

It could also be used to incorporate ‘taste-masking’ flavours and allow drugs to be produced in different shapes, which is significant since different shapes influence how the medication is released.

Aprecia Pharmaceuticals reports having the rights to more than 50 patents related to the pharmaceutical applications of 3D printing, making it likely that other drugs will shortly take advantage of the platform.

Other 3D advances include the development of a ‘universal chemistry set’ by Lee Cronin, from Glasgow University, using elements such as carbon, hydrogen and oxygen as ‘inks’, together with agents such as vegetable oils and paraffin.

Using this technology, Cronin suggests that doctors would ultimately be able to provide patients with algorithms to print their medications at home.

In cancer research a possibility is the development of ‘bioprinted’ 3D tissue that could mimic the realistic growth of tumours, and enable toxicity to be tested prior to animal and human studies.

Such an approach, researchers suggest, would overcome the inherent limitations of working with two dimensional samples.

3D printing technology could also incorporate different mutations in cancer cells, allowing specific therapies to be tested for individual cancer patients.

Finally the Institute of Cancer Research is producing accurate 3D models of tumours and the surrounding organs, to plan the delivery of radiopharmaceuticals which are used to treat thyroid cancer, cancers of nerve cells in children and bone metastases.

The challenge here is to give doses that are high enough to kill cancer cells without causing damage to the healthy surrounding tissue.