3D-printed pills

Business Daily

BBC

News, Business

4.4 • 796 Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2020

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Could the much-hyped technology of 3D printing have found a useful application - producing personalised prescription pills?

Ed Butler visits the lab of Dr Mohamed Alhnan at King's College London, to see this cottage manufacturing process in action - in this case making caffeine tablets. Meanwhile entrepreneur Melissa Snover has launched the world’s first 3D-printed personalised and chewable vitamin supplement provider, called Nourished.

But what about prescription pills? Can this technology reliably produce powerful medicines at scale, and meet the necessary regulatory requirements? Karen Taylor, research director of the Centre for Health Solutions at Deloitte, isn't so sure.

Producer: Joshua Thorpe

(Picture: White pills against a red background; Credit: BiffBoffBiff/Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi there, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. Coming up, are 3D printers
0:08.9	about to transform the way we make medicines? There's a huge power in digitising the process.
0:16.0	A pharmacist can approve a tablet on a screen on his office and the tablet can be printed far away in another
0:22.9	site. But is 3D printing really the miracle for drug manufacturer that some are claiming?
0:28.5	As yet, there is no system for ensuring the safety and efficacy of 3D printed drugs.
0:34.1	There is no proof yet that this is a clean, effective, efficient and safe way of
0:39.0	producing drugs. Printed drugs on demand? Today's Business Daily from the BBC.
0:46.6	Here you can see a CAD design for the process and if I'm happy with it I can actually send a print order.
1:01.0	You find me in the King's College London lab of Dr. Muhammad Al Nann.
1:10.0	He's showing me exactly how to 3D print a pharmaceutical drug.
1:14.7	In this case, it's a caffeine pill.
1:19.0	So what you're looking at is a building plate, yeah, which is the foundation of the process.
1:26.6	Essentially, what we've got here is a little white string.
1:30.1	It looks like it's a filament and it's got 5% caffeine.
1:32.9	It says on the plastic.
1:34.2	So essentially that is the raw ingredient, right,
1:36.6	that we're going to be putting into the machine to construct,
1:40.0	to manufacture a single capsule.
1:43.3	Exactly.
1:44.2	These are made of 100% pharmaceutical grade material.
1:48.7	And in the future, compounding pharmacies or hospital pharmacies
1:53.6	will have access to these filaments for their patients.
	...

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