3D-Printed Personalised Tablet for Gastrointestinal Disorders
Health Science

3D-Printed Personalised Tablet for Gastrointestinal Disorders

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  • PI
  • Giorgia
  • Collaborator
  • CraftHealth
  • Supported by
  • NAMIC
  • AM Tech
  • FDM

Problem Statement

Patients take too many tablets daily, leading to poor outcomes associated with polypharmacy. There is a need for personalised on-demand poly-pills in patients who face problems of malabsorption, high pill burden and multiple supplementations.

Objective

To develop a 3D printing process for personalised tablets and conduct testing & validation of 3D printed tablets

 

Craft Health have developed Craft Blends™, a proprietary database of formulations made up of paste materials for 3D Printing. In the example above, a 2-in-1 polypill consisting of Vitamin B3 and caffeine with two distinct release profiles, immediate release and sustained release respectively, were 3D printed as an initial proof of concept. Active ingredients may be added to the Craft Blends™ for the desired release profile and rendered 3D printable.

Key Benefits/Outcomes

  • Developed 3 different pharmaceutical formulation bases of different release profiles such as immediate and sustained release for the incorporation of various active ingredients to be used in 3D printing.
  • Set up the process for 3D printing of personalised supplement or medicines using a paste extrusion 3D printer.
  • Demonstrated the combination of various active ingredients into a single pill, while still maintaining its own unique chemical structure and properties.
  • Printed tablet has equivalent, if not better properties such as dissolution profiles or hardness, as compared to existing commercial drug tablets.
  • Led to one patent filing and creation of a spin-off company (CRAFT HEALTH PTE LTD). The project team has secured NUS GRIP award in its inaugural run and has since raised SGD 950,00 investment in their seed round to further develop and scale up their 3D printing platform for personalised nutrition and medicine.

 

Principal Investigator

Associate Professor Giorgia Pastorin

Prof Giorgia Pastorin is currently responsible for enhancing the research culture and identifying research opportunities in the Department of Pharmacy, Faculty of Science, NUS. Her research interests are focused on nanomaterials for biomedical applications, especially Drug & gene delivery. Her group has been among the first ones to create nano-bottles, by sealing the opened ends of nanocarriers after loading molecules inside. This strategy, based on the nanocarriers’ interior with favorable energy towards molecules’ adsorption, protects drugs from premature deactivation and non-specific interactions. Concurrently, her team has been developing some nano-needle devices and nanoformulations for transdermal delivery of drugs. Their purpose is to exploit some of our nanoformulations and to apply them to different pathological conditions, ranging from cancer, chronic inflammatory diseases, immunotherapy, neurodegenerative diseases, etc. In the last few years, her interest has shifted from synthetic materials (e.g. carbon nanotubes) to explore cell-derived nanovesicles (CDNs). These nanovesicles retain the natural targeting properties of parent cells (while conventional drug delivery systems require artificial insertions of targeting moieties) and utilize innate mechanisms of internalization and trafficking, which enhance permeability into target cells and might be further exploited to deliver drugs and/or genetic material. A small project is also devoted to the synthesis, characterization and structure-activity-relationship profile of new chemical entities for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease.