NUS Engineering team develops novel technology to ‘print’ customised tablets for personalised medicine

The drug tablet consists of three components, including a polymer containing the drug in a specifically designed shape that will determine the rate of release of the drug

A team of researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have found a way to make personalised medicine cheaper and easier. The new method of tablet fabrication has been designed by Assistant Professor Soh Siowling and PhD student Sun Yajuan from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the NUS Faculty of Engineering. The novel system can make customisable pills that release drugs with any desired release profiles.

Releasing drugs in a timely manner is important for optimal therapeutic effect in the human body. Different types of clinical circumstances may call for different types of timed release of drugs.

While there are some existing tablet-production methods, including 3D printing, that can allow certain flexibility, they have their limitations — low dosage, release profiles that are non-continuous, or the drugs are released in a large burst in the initial stage, and poor durability of the tablet given its quick breakdown. These methods are also only able to fabricate tablets that release drugs with a limited type of profiles.

Instead of manufacturing the drug tablet by printing layer by layer, the drug tablet designed by the NUS team consists of three components, including a polymer containing the drug in a specifically designed shape that will determine the rate of release of the drug. By adjusting the shape of the drug-containing polymer, it is thus possible to release drugs at any desired rate.

Using the system designed by the NUS team, a doctor only needs to draw the desired release profile in a computer software to generate a template for making tablets specific to a patient’s treatment, which can then be used to easily produce the desired pills using a 3D printer. The system is easy to use and does not involve any complex mathematical computation whenever a new release profile is needed. The fully customisable system is able to create a template to print tablets for any release profile.

The use of a commercially available 3D printer in this method also makes it a relatively cheap way of making personalised medicine a reality.

In drug delivery, it is also important to administer more than one type of drug into the human body simultaneously to treat an illness. This fabrication method can also be modified to include multiple types of drugs loaded within the same tablet — and more importantly, each drug can be customised to release at different rates even within the same tablet.

“For a long time, personalised tablet has been a mere concept as it was far too complex or expensive to be realised. This new tablet fabrication method is a game changer — it is technically simple, relatively inexpensive and versatile. It can be applied at individualised settings where physicians could produce customised pills on the spot for patients, or in mass production settings by pharmaceutical companies,” said Soh.