Implementation of three-dimensional drug printing for personalized medice: techniques, current research, and challenges

Abstract

Personalized medicine is an approach that seeks individualized treatments for each patient to improve pharmacotherapeutic success. Technological advances in recent years have allowed the manufacture of medications through three-dimensional printing, which has excellent potential to move away from the one-size- fits-all approach. The different techniques facilitate the development of pharmaceutical forms with colors, flavors, shapes, doses, combinations of drugs, and release profiles adapted to each person's characteristics, needs, and preferences. Each procedure has advantages and disadvantages, which must be evaluated to determine the best option for creating the desired formulation. An essential problem is more regulation, which has meant that, to date, only one drug has been approved by the FDA employing this technology. Nevertheless, more preclinical and clinical research is being done on drugs with complex approaches at the pharmacotherapeutic level. In addition, more companies are making efforts to develop exclusive equipment for the pharmaceutical industry capable of producing these pharmaceutical forms.