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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.
Shape and rate of dissolution are already well known, and heavily used.
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...
They kept the surface area constant between the shapes.
That's how most of the '-contin' formulations work (eg oxycontin). You make tiny pellets of the analgesic, add a thin layer of wax to some, a thicker layer to some, a thicker yet layer to some, then make up a pill containing some pellets with no coating, and some with each of the increasingly thicker layers of wax. When you swallow the pill, the stuff with no layer goes into immediate effect (so you get fast acting relief). The acid in your stomach starts dissolving the wax around the rest, with the different thicknesses of wax acting to give a continuous release of the remaining analgesic. Different formulations have differing amounts of the initial uncoated analgesic.