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Researchers Discover Breakthrough Drug Delivery Method By Changing Shape of Pill
ErnieKey writes: Researchers at the UCL School of Pharmacy, University College London have found a way to change the rate of dissolution within medication via a 3D printing method. Researchers used MakerBot's water- soluble filament, cut it into tiny pieces and mixed in acetaminophen. They then used the Filabot extruder to extrude a drug infused filament. With this filament they printed odd shaped pills and tested them to see what effect different shapes had on the speed at which they dissolved. What they concluded was that these odd shaped pills allowed for different rates of absorption, enabling custom medications for patients.
Surface area to volume ratio found to affect rate of dissolution, details at 11.
Shape and rate of dissolution are already well known, and heavily used.
Fred or Dino?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
This raises the question of why nobody currently offers a slow-release alalgesic coated with a layer of fast-acting analgesic. Seems like that would be just the thing for immediate relief without having to keep popping pills.
I thought we reached peak hype last year. Jesus Christ, is putting a different nozzle on my Cake Mate tube also 3D printing?
Ironically, it is a Jagged Little Pill.
Didn't actually RTFA, though, so my sarcasm may be unwarranted. You have been warned! :-)
those pyramid shaped pills . Almost as bad as the suppositories.
The study is an attempt to find correlation between the surface area and dissolution rate.... Every year there are are trillions of pills manufactured pharmaceutical companies and there are many parameters that are being tested, all branch of one of the pharmacology and it is called pharmaceutics, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... . You can bet that in pharmaceutical manufacturing is super efficient and yes, for the manufacturing of this kind of scale, there is always a demand for improvement and innovations. Happy to encourage scientific research in academia, but announcing 3D printed pills a breakthrough is a bit of exaggeration, but that is not to say that there is no practical application to it.
Custom 3D sculpturing is a blast from 17th and 18th century, when pharmacists ground and mixed medications and it was a manual process. Article is clear that 3D printing may allow to customize absorption rate... This needs to be approved by FDA, at least in USA, before the regular patient can acquire it.
That being said, this will be just one of many medication delivery methods competing with already established methods and curious reader can, again, get a glimpse to the methods here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
- I can't swallow that!
- Well then good news! It's a suppository!
Did they test the rate in an actual human or just in solution? Human biology is remarkably complex. The physical properties (including movement) of the stomach and intestines greatly affect dissolution rates.
Sounds like that just dissolved different shaped pills in a solution (which is simply just surface area) and extrapolated. Good luck IRL, morons.
They found out that the best delivery method for Viagra is little cock-shaped pills.
Rocket Motors have been using this technique the last 70+ yrs.
Is the Maker Bot water-soluble filament safe to digest? I'd google it to find out, but I prefer the human contact of a question answered.
You are welcome on my lawn.
OK, its a kind-of minor thing that can have implications. If you go to any eepybird mentos/coke website, you can see (for yourself) that the physical surface of a substance can radically affect the diffusion rate (large surface area = large rate), and rapid absorption can be attained by going away from perfectly round/smooth surfaces to one with highly fragmented micro-surface features. They already know that micro surface features can prevent spread of disease (microban makes millions per year selling this technology to hospitals). Given all the available previous information, designing pills to have modified drug delivery rates seems like a technology who's time has come.
Too bad it's a stupid idea, it's defeated if someone bites into the pill or crushes them, just like my mother does, because they can't swallow all those big pills.
...looks like it would be especially fun to swallow.
If they need to mess with the surface, just make it a bit larger to accommodate internal passages that increase the total surface area, but leave the functional geometry of the boundary surface as it is so that the pills are still as easy to swallow.
Apple got a patent on making their product a certain shape (rounded corners).
Big pharma didn't want to miss out on the action, but they sure took their time to catch up.
Did they try all the shapes from Lucky Charms? I want to know which marshmallow is going to give me the best delivery of time-release aspirin.
So they probably used paracetemol.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Which shape will get me highest the fastest? That's what I expect will be the most common question asked.
I see many possible problems with this, getting it FDA approved is just one of them. What will prevent someone from printing a hollow pill and stealing what what supposed to go in the middle to sell on the black market? The pills could be weighed but the pills could be filled with something of equal mass like sugar, sand, or something not so inert.
Will these pills be printed at the pharmacy? I seem to recall previous issues with poorly monitored medicine factories that did not require FDA oversight because they weren't "making" drugs as it was defined in law, they were merely mixing drugs that were made elsewhere and doing so in less than sanitary conditions. The FDA has failed us before and state agencies didn't feel compelled to pick up the slack, or was prevented from doing so by federal law.
Seems to me that there would be much less costly means to meter dosages than printing each pill individually. I can see this being used like it was described in the article, testing shapes in the real world before going through an expensive process of tooling up for mass production.
Edible 3D printing material could allow for making pills that carry all kinds of substances. Also, assuming high enough resolution on the printing process someone could make fake drugs. The little image on the label of what the pills inside a bottle should like like may no longer be sufficient to prevent theft of medicines, for example.
I can think of all kinds of legal and beneficial uses of technology like this too. As soon and someone reveals how this technology can be used for illegal activities in a public enough forum that some congresscritter sees it I suspect we're going to see a law passed that will ban or severely restrict this technology. I'll give the total freak out over the people that printed a firearm as an example of what kind of freak out to expect.
Good stuff, but the technology will very likely be held up by a government that cannot allow the public to have the freedom to experiment on their own.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Have fun replacing your makerbot smart extruder frequently, paying lots of $$$ for it.
I'm still using my first extruder on my Mendel, 4 years usage.
I'm sure there will be no negative side effects from having 100% of the active ingredient of a medication be absorbed into your blood stream in a matter of seconds. Pills are specifically designed to release their medicinal goodness over time for a reason. The only people that will benefit from this "research" are addicts looking to get their high's quicker.