Direct Granule Feeding of Thermal 3D Printing of Pharmaceutical Solid Dosage Forms

Synopsis

3D printing technologies have been recognised as having significant potential for on-demand manufacturing of personalised medicine due to their advantage of accurately controlling the microstructure of solid dosage forms. One of the most researched and published thermal-based 3D printing method is fused deposition modelling (FDM). However, there are significant formulation limitations with FDM as most pharmaceutical grade polymers cannot be directly used to form printable filaments, and the addition of excipients such as plasticisers are necessary to enable printing. These additives used to tune the mechanical properties of the filaments can often have undesired effects on drug release. This talk will discuss the development of the first direct granule fed 3D printing of pharmaceutical solid dosage forms with high precision to print solid and porous structures. The printing used in this study, Arburg Plastic Freeforming (APF), thermally processes granules and extrudes drops of material under high pressure. This fundamental difference with FDM led to the improved ability in printing porous structure with materials that are not possible to process without additives, such as plasticisers that often could have an undesired impact on drug release performance.