Personalized Polypills Produced by Fused Deposition Modeling 3D Printing

Abstract

Personalized medicine in the literature commonly refers to using patient's genetic information to enable therapeutic decisions tailored to an individual patient. Personalized pills containing more than one drug are referred as polypills, which is a term exclusively used in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases (CVD) in the literature, but the usage is expanded to cover a range of pills that combine many medicines to provide a single solid dosage form that allows the patients to self‐administer easily. Polypharmacy is used in the medical literature to describe the co‐administration of multiple medications to patients who may have multiple comorbidities. There are a number of critical process parameters (CPPs) controlling the quality of fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printing. Two common methods of preparing drug‐loaded filaments have been reported in the pharmaceutical literature: impregnation and extrusion. It has been widely recognized that FDM 3D printing has unique advantages for fabricating personalized polypills.