Personalized pharmaceuticals? Additive printing is revolutionizing the pharmaceutical industry among many others. There is a profile of patients who need special drugs outside the usual industry, and precisely for this non-commercial profile, 3D printing is able to provide viable solutions.
Science is making use of 3D printing technologies to achieve pharmaceutical solutions thanks to a multifunctional high-tech bioprinter that is capable of producing drugs and biological prototypes. A printer or bioprinter with an extrusion, inkjet and hot-melt print head. Thus, three-dimensional structures of organs or tissues can be manufactured, and complex 3D structures are achieved by seamlessly combining biological materials and cells.
Specific techniques in electrospinning and electroscribing are already capable of collaborating in healthcare projects for tissue regeneration and biodevices, and are also already evolving to achieve better achievements in microfibers and thus expand the solutions they are capable of printing.
The broad objective is to make it possible to develop personalized drugs and for 3D printing to evolve towards new techniques for printing biological structures and tissues at the service of hospitals.
In the Basque Country, the NanoBioCel research team at the public university has developed a project called 'APD-Advance Pharma Development' precisely to advance this type of techniques and solutions, and has already installed a 3D bioprinter at the Tecnalia research and technological advances center.
The advance of a bioprinter is so ambitious that a platform has already been set up through which advanced biomedicine projects can be submitted for study and assessment of their feasibility. It is clear that the field of medicine and pharmacy have a long way to go thanks to additive printing and 3D printers can be the best allies of science and research today, and of many industries in the very near future.
