EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATIONS AND MODELING OF ADDITIVELY MANUFACTURED PERSONALIZED ORAL DRUG DELIVERY SYSTEM

Abstract

The Additive Manufacturing (AM) or 3D printing technology has been widely accepted as an ingenious fabrication process whose applications have been found across a wide variety of manufacturing sectors. It has significant contributions in the field of rapid tooling, electronics, aerospace engineering, jewellery industry, medicine, pharmaceuticals and many more. Researchers envisage AM as a means that can drive innovation, versatility and affordability hand in hand. According to Wohler‘s Report 2019, AM has the potential to generate a turnover of about $35.6 billions by 2024. Its significance has also escalated in the spheres of pharmacy, medicine, drug delivery over the years. The growing demand medical field in drug delivery systems, organ printing, customised implants, scaffolds, tissue design has augmented the growing importance of additive manufacturing in the field of medicine. Additive manufacturing has a scope of producing drugs tailoring the needs of individual patient at affordable price. The need of custom-made drugs and other medical requirements has been increasing over the time owing to its capability of treating each individual patient according to the metabolism of the body. To explore the potential of AM in personalized drug delivery, this research work strived to fabricate oral drug delivery tablets that provide personalized medications to individual patient by altering the printing parameters. In this regard, one of the widely accepted Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) 3D printing technique was utilised to produce the oral tablets. The filaments were loaded with the drugs using various techniques and then these were fed into the 3D printer to fabricate the oral pills. These pills were then dissolved under controlled conditions to ascertain the drug release patterns and release durations. All the necessary thermal, mechanical, physical, imagery, pharmaceutical tests have been conducted continuously in all the approaches to validate the feasibility of this attempt. Numerous parameters of FDM printer were taken into consideration and optimization have been conducted to obtain the best combination of printing parameters to achieve best drug release behaviour. Layer thickness, infill patterns were found to be the most significant parameters. As a result, a novel attempt has been made to introduce hybrid infill patterns into the architecture of 3D printed oral tablets. These hybrid infill patterns enabled the tablets to tap into the interstitial drug dissolution timings that were often unreachable by conventional infill pattern designs available in commercial slicing software. In addition, the dissolution process was validated using computational analysis that was conducted based on the differential equation to simulate the polymer degradation and drug release for a 3D-printed tablet for different shapes and designs.