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You Could Soon Be Manufacturing Your Own Drugs -- Thanks To 3D Printing (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Forget those long lines at the pharmacy: Someday soon, you might be making your own medicines at home. That's because researchers have tailored a 3D printer to synthesize pharmaceuticals and other chemicals from simple, widely available starting compounds fed into a series of water bottle -- size reactors. The work, they say, could digitize chemistry, allowing users to synthesize almost any compound anywhere in the world.
In today's issue of Science, Leroy Cronin, a chemist at the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom, and his colleagues report printing a series of interconnected reaction vessels that carry out four different chemical reactions involving 12 separate steps, from filtering to evaporating different solutions. By adding different reagents and solvents at the right times and in a precise order, they were able to convert simple, widely available starting compounds into a muscle relaxant called baclofen. And by designing reactionware to carry out different chemical reactions with different reagents, they produced other medicines, including an anticonvulsant and a drug to fight ulcers and acid reflux. So why not just buy a reactionware kit and scrap the printing? "This approach will allow the on-demand production of chemicals and drugs that are in short supply, hard to make at big facilities, and allow customization to tailor them to the application," Cronin says.
In today's issue of Science, Leroy Cronin, a chemist at the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom, and his colleagues report printing a series of interconnected reaction vessels that carry out four different chemical reactions involving 12 separate steps, from filtering to evaporating different solutions. By adding different reagents and solvents at the right times and in a precise order, they were able to convert simple, widely available starting compounds into a muscle relaxant called baclofen. And by designing reactionware to carry out different chemical reactions with different reagents, they produced other medicines, including an anticonvulsant and a drug to fight ulcers and acid reflux. So why not just buy a reactionware kit and scrap the printing? "This approach will allow the on-demand production of chemicals and drugs that are in short supply, hard to make at big facilities, and allow customization to tailor them to the application," Cronin says.
There's not going to be a generic 3D "molecular printer" for a long, long time. For one thing, lots of interesting reactions require special conditions that won't sit well with generic "3D printing" stuff: heat, catalysts, pressure, nasty precursors.
People already manufacture their own drugs at home, these homes are generally referred to as "meth labs"...
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You can actually manufacture drugs yourself right now.
It is not fucking 3-D printing buzzword bullshit. And it is not new. And there are plenty of manufacturers of purpose built equipment for this sort of thing tha make much more sense than adapting a garage toy.
http://www.gilson.com/en/GilsonProducts/AutomatedSystems.aspx
https://www.agilent.com/en-us/products/automation-solutions
But you're still going to need purification, assay and QA. (You'll need high pressure liquid chromatographs, gas chromatographs, mass spectrometers...)
No, you can't make drugs at home without a proper lab.
Anyone could certainly create any drug or good available in the market, but this is impractical for many reasons like price, raw material availability, usual low flexibility of manufacturing processes, etc. to not mention other issues like patents or even legal prohibitions.
This reminds me the time when I jokily said to some (extremely naive, detached-from-reality) people that I was planning to create a company to sell drugs. The most surprising bit wasn't they blindly believing such a nonsense, but seriously thinking that that scenario could occur at all. I mean people whose knowledge about something mostly consist in extrapolating the few ideas they have from sources like movies or out-of-context news. I guess that everyone is a bit like this at some point and for different reasons. Properly-speaking people learn from their errors and accept the limitations of their knowledge. In-denial souls/true suckers/fanatics blindly stick to their distorted perception of reality and even use it as starting step to come up with further nonsensical ideas.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
The main difference between medicine and poison is dosage. My blood thinner is actually a low-dose rat poison. Have some software or hardware malfunction and screw up the dosage, and things could get really serious. Sooo... no thanks...
3D printing is awesome tech and will have tremendous utility but too many people are treating it like its some sort of magical-do-anything technology. Could it someday "print" something as sophisticated as a drug on a commercial basis? Sure, maybe. Many many years from now. As it stands we are a long way from that. It probably won't actually be what we think of as a 3D printer unless you use such a generic definition of the term as to render it almost meaningless. Think about it - how is a molecule really 3D from a macroscopic point of view? Yes it isn't technically flat but it's about as close as you can get to being literally 2D. It's kind of like how people lately are throwing around the term AI for any clever computer system even when the term doesn't really fit.
My day job is running a manufacturing company and I've got direct experience working with 3D printing in a prototyping lab from a previous day job. I've worked with some of the large Stratasys machines making plastic parts and a machine that did sintered metals too. There are a few important limitations on 3D printing the most important of which are economic rather than technical:
1) It is slow to make most items. In most circumstances 3D printing takes a LOT longer than most other manufacturing processes.
2) It is hard to make something with mixed materials. Not impossible and there is progress but don't mistake one for a Star Trek replicator.
3) 3D printing is typically VERY expensive on a unit cost basis for most items compared with other manufacturing techniques even including distribution costs once you get above very small volumes. This is the most important limitation.
4) 3D printed parts typically require some amount of manufacturing even after leaving the printer to become useful.
Now 3D printing will get faster and the technology will improve - probably quite a lot. But for economic reasons it's probably never going to see much use for mass production within the lifetime of anyone who reads this. It's primary utility will be for items that cannot be economically made and distributed in small quantities - which is still a very substantial market. Prototypes, rare/obsolete parts, very small production runs, custom parts, etc. It also will have utility in places where distribution is problematic. Think Antarctica in winter or in space where resupply is tough to impossible.
They will not be too thrilled bout having this tech in hospitals either.
Hospitals (specially those with a university nearby) (and in theory even pharmacy stores too - though in my limited US experience these seem to have been replaced by some type of supermarket that happen to sell a bit of medications too) already have small labs that can produce a limited amount of medication.
Such "lab-in-a-kit" approach could only be expanding a bit the kind of stuff they can produce locally.
(Or in the case of hospital-with-a-university-lab-within-reach, reducing the time to bring the medication for the simpler molecule that are within reach of the "lab-in-a-kit" and don't require the full university lab).
In these contexts, it's not much a big change, and probably won't register on the pharma's radar.
but I don't think we're going to see such devices in homes in our lifetime, if ever.
Especially if the pharma lobby has its way.
You think, so? Nope. On the contrary.
Home drugs is a giant market, and this is definitely a way to secure a foot in it.
They'll patent it, run through certification projects (rising costs) and sell it, for a premium.
THEN SELL THE EXCLUSIVE CONTRACTS to provide the necessary consumable for your home drug synthesizer.
You though inkjet cartridges were as expensive as if they were filled with unicorn blood ?
Just wait to see the price the pharma companies are going to charge you for their "Drug-o-tron 3000" cartridge replacements. And as these are used for drugs manufacture, you bet there are doing to be heavy regulations by the FDA preventing you to refill the cartridges yourself. (Much better regulated than the current meager attempts to invoke DMCA regarding small counting chips emebed in inkjet cartridges).
This partially cures the pharma industries worst nightmare :
The worst nightmare is not to have any new molecule to sell once your older patents run out, while your competitor manage to put something on the market.
Suddenly you're the guy left out, not having anything lucrative to sell, and having missed the market the other managed to enter.
With this kind of "at-home-lab-kits", suddenly it doesn't matter as much. Even if your competitor is the one who lands the patent to sell a new drug, you can still make a chunk of money by selling the exclusive cartridges to the patient so they can fab-at-home it.
And unlike inkjet cartridges (which have basically used the same type of unicorn blood inside for the past decade), the "fab-a-drug-at-home" technology is bound to evolve over the next decades. Meaning new, freshly patented system requiring new cartridge contract everyfew year (think rebuying your smartphone every 2-3 years, except wich actual physico-chemical justification for newer synth tech).
Throw in remote data collection, and the insurance companies will happily jump together into the bandwagon.
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Microscale chemistry has been a thing for a long time now, and it's not all that difficult. If these drugs could be cost-effectively produced in this fashion then they would be. On top of that, I've done a bit of 3D printing, and my faith in the ability of 3D printers to produce complex systems flawlessly every time is nil.