Enabling high-fidelity personalised pharmaceutical tablets through multimaterial inkjet 3D printing with a water-soluble excipient

Abstract

Additive manufacturing offers manufacture of personalised pharmaceutical tablets through design freedoms and material deposition control at an individual voxel level. This control goes beyond geometry and materials choices: inkjet based 3D printing enables the precise deposition (10–80 μm) of multiple materials, which permits integration of precise doses with tailored release rates; in the meanwhile, this technique has demonstrated its capability of high-volume personalised production. In this paper we demonstrate how two dissimilar materials, one water soluble and one insoluble, can be co-printed within a design envelope to dial up a range of release rates including slow (0.98 ± 0.04 mg/min), fast (4.07 ± 0.25 mg/min) and multi-stepped (2.17 ± 0.04 mg/min then 0.70 ± 0.13 mg/min) dissolution curves. To achieve this, we adopted poly-4-acryloylmorpholine (poly-ACMO) as a new photocurable water-soluble carrier and demonstrated its contemporaneous deposition with an insoluble monomer. The water soluble ACMO formulation with aspirin incorporated was successfully printed and cured under UV light and a wide variety of shapes with material distributions that control drug elution was successfully fabricated by inkjet based 3D printing technique, suggesting its viability as a future personalised solid dosage form fabrication routine.