Printable nanomedicines: the future of customized drug delivery?

摘要

The introduction of printing technologies to emerge medicine and other pharmaceuticals includes printing as alternative fabrication method for dosage forms and drug delivery systems [l] and cell-based constructions for diagnostics, implants and even for potential organ replacements [2]. The advantages of printing technologies for multiple applications lay at hand; printing enables flexible, fast and individual solutions for multiple applications. It is not only possible to print liquid materials onto surfaces (2D), but also to build 3D constructs. A printing system using active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) opens up opportunities to fabricate tailored and customized drug delivery systems for individual patients. Although marketed products are yet to be established, more personalized medicinal products are beneficial in particular for special patient groups. These include for instance the elderly, who often face multimorbidity and administration issues; and also others, such as children [3]. Since the majority of active pharmaceutical ingredients and, especially new chemical entities (up to 90%) have poor solubility, the research community in this area is very interested in overcoming solubility issues by using new technologies. Combining an inkjet printing and drug nanonization procedure has been described in recent literature, [4] and furthermore, the use of nanosuspensions as inks has been successfully demonstrated [5,6]. In these cases, the API itself has been formulated as a nanosuspension, but certain advantages could be expected by incorporating the API into a nanocarrier that is subsequently formulated into an ink, but this is still a relatively unexplored area.