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Dose Printing Shows Promise at the University of Michigan

Printing multiple meds onto a single dose on any number of surfaces could disrupt drug development, pharmacy operations and drug delivery/patient adherence.

Graduate student research assistant in the Shtein lab, Siddharth Borsadia, prints fluorescein crystals onto a cooled glass plate using organic vapor jet printing. (Photo by Levi Hutmacher, Michigan Engineering.)
Graduate student research assistant in the Shtein lab, Siddharth Borsadia, prints fluorescein crystals onto a cooled glass plate using organic vapor jet printing. (Photo by Levi Hutmacher, Michigan Engineering.)

Recent progress in therapeutic treatment advances make terms such as “disruptive,” “innovative,” and “revolutionary” trite, yet an organic vapor jet printing technology in development at the University of Michigan could simultaneously deliver the following impressive gains:

• Enable patients to take a single daily dose that would include multiple medications, making it easier to adhere to prescribed regimens.

• Impact operations for pharmacists in either a retail or hospital environment via on-site vapor printing of such medications onto a variety of substrates.

• Accelerate drug development for the pharmaceutical industry.

“Pharma companies have libraries of millions of compounds to evaluate, and one of the first tests is solubility,” says Max Shtein, Professor of Materials Science andEngineering at the University of Michigan. “About half of new compounds fail this test and are ruled out. Organic vapor jet printing could make some of them more soluble, putting them back into the pipeline.”

This dose-printing technique was developed through a collaboration between the University of Michigan’s departments of chemical engineering and biomedical engineering, the College of Pharmacy and the department of physics in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.

According to a UM online article, the technology emanates from an electronics manufacturing process that prints a fine crystalline structure over a large surface area. The process allows printed medications to easily dissolve, “opening the door to a variety of potential new drugs that today are shelved because they don't dissolve well when administered with conventional approaches, including pills and capsules.”

The vapor printing technique can print multiple medications into a single dose on a dissolvable strip, microneedle patch or other dosing device. It is the subject of a study led by Shtein and Olga Shalev, a recent graduate who worked on the project while a doctoral student in the same department. The UM article said the process “showed that the pure printed medication can destroy cultured cancer cells in the lab as effectively as medication delivered by traditional means, which rely on chemical solvents to enable the cells to absorb the medication.”

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