An overview on 3D Printed Medicine

Three-dimensional printing (3DP) is a digitally-controlled additive manufacturing technique used for fast prototyping. This paper reviews various 3D printing techniques like Selective Laser Sintering (SLS), Fused Deposition Modeling, (FDM), Semi-solid extrusion (SSE), Stereolithography (SLA), Thermal Inkjet (TIJ) Printing, and Binder jetting 3D Printing along with their application in the field of medicine. Normal medicines are based on the principle of “one-size-fits-all”. This is not true always, it is possible medicine used for curing one patient is giving some side effects to another. To overcome this drawback “3D Printed medicines” are developed. In this paper, 3D printed medicines forming different Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API) are reviewed. Printed medicines are capable of only curing the diseases, not for the diagnosis. Nanomedicines have “theranostic” ability which combines therapeutic and diagnostic. Nanoparticles are used as the drug delivery system (DDS) to damaged cells’ specific locations. By the use of nanomedicine, the fast recovery of the disease is possible. The plant-based nanoparticles are used with herbal medicines which give low-cost and less toxic medication called nanobiomedicine. 4D and 5D printing technology for the medical field are also enlightened in this paper. CONTACT Hari Murthy hari.murthy@christuniversity.in Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru. © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Enviro Research Publishers. This is an Open Access article licensed under a Creative Commons license: Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY). Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13005/msri/180102 Article History Received: 28 January 2021 Accepted: 13 April 2021