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U. Mich. Explores Drug Printing Technology

News  |  By John Commins  
   October 04, 2017

The cutting edge technique is still a few years away from the marketplace, but it could have the potential to greatly expand the applications for prescription drugs and the way they are delivered.

University of Michigan researchers are working on a technology that can print pure, precise doses of prescription drugs onto various surfaces, which the developers believe could enable on-site printing of custom-dose medications at pharmacies, hospitals, and physicians’ offices.  

The technique can print multiple medications into a single dose on a dissolvable strip, microneedle patch or other dosing device. Researchers believe it could make life easier for patients who must now take multiple medications every day.

Max Shtein, professor of materials science and engineering at U of M, is leading the research. He spoke with HealthLeaders Media about the potential for the new technology. The following is a slightly edited transcript.  

HLM: How soon will we see this technology in the market place?

Shtein: We think that possibly within five years you might be able to see some applications of this technology. There are different bottlenecks associated with Food and Drug Administration approval, depending on the medications and the indications and the conditions you are trying to treat.

Normally FDA approval for any new medication or process for making a medication takes a while. There are certain conditions for which very few treatments are effective and those gets fast-tracked through the process. There are some possibilities for things to go a little faster. There are also possibilities for using this technology in research in the drug discovery and validation stages. We think that it’s going to be finding applications pretty soon, within five years.

HLM: Are you looking to focus on a particular field of study?

Shtein: Oncology is a very interesting area in part because the medicines can be quite expensive, the treatments can be quite complex, and oftentimes there are certain characteristics of the medication for treating cancer that make it difficult to get the medicine to the cancer, to maintain a regime that people are going to be willing to go through.

There are a lot of possibilities in treating cancers locally, but there is no way to deliver the medication locally, aside from painful injections and even that is an issue because the medicine doesn’t dissolve well. We have worked with a couple of compounds that are used for treating cancer, and we showed that we can enhance these solutions. Toxic solvents aren’t needed for getting it into the system. We demonstrated in a petri dish and there is a lot of promise, but you won’t know how it will work in a living system until you do those studies.

HLM: Does this technology have the potential to disrupt how pharmaceuticals are delivered?

Shtein: We don’t aim to disrupt. That is not our goal. What want to provide a better way of doing things and hope there is a more natural migration of interest from the old crummy way of doing it into this new better way of doing it.

From a standpoint of a person needing something that is uniquely tuned to their body, metabolism, genetic condition or whatever, it is going to be super easy to do that. If you have a course of action that requires a dozen different drugs or compounds and you have to take a dozen pills on a complicated daily schedule, and for half of the drugs the amount is too large and for the other half it is too small, that’s pretty hard.

With our techniques you should sidestep all of that. You print exactly what the person needs. You can do it in a pharmacy or maybe at a doctor’s office or maybe distributed manufacturing thing going on to make that possible. Thinking about it in those terms, all of a sudden it opens possibilities for prescribing medicines in a totally different way.

HLM: Should the shareholders at CVS or Walgreens be nervous?

Shtein: This could be an opportunity for them too. They might have a bunch of people in back now who are counting pills and mixing solutions when they could be providing a lot more value if they could personalize the medicine even further.

There is a big trade off in the pharmaceutical industry and healthcare that personalization is expensive and completely at odds with manufacturability and scalability. If you want to make something cheap it has to be all the same. That goes against the idea of personalization. With this approach you break this trade-off. There is no dilemma. There is no longer an either/or situation. You can get personalization and ease of manufacturing.

HLM: Who owns the rights to this?

Shtein: The University of Michigan has the rights to the technology, but we are in conversations to see what the best way to proceed would be.

HLM: What should we be looking for as this technology progresses?

Shtein: We need input from people who are out there working with specific ailments and conditions who are developing treatments. In particular, folks are working to develop data bases based on electronic medical records that allow a very intelligence physician or a deep-learning algorithm to learn what each patient needs and translate that to formulations.

We want to find conditions that are very difficult to treat using existing techniques where people could look at our study and get inspired to say ‘Could you help us with this compound delivered in this particular way to treat this condition?’ if we could work with those people we could get a cure to that population sooner.

HLM: Can this technology be used remotely?

Shtein: When you need something specific you can have a set of instructions and a cartridge or series of cartridges and this thing makes it on demand. Rather than transporting boxes of pills all over the place, it is a much more elegant way to do it.

HLM: What other uses do you foresee for this technology?

Shtein: Doing diagnostics to help people avoid acute conditions and reduce the cost of healthcare. This technique may help with that. We can deliver so many different compounds on a small area extremely precisely. That can be used for diagnostics.

For example, let’s say you’re allergic to something but you don’t know what. Right now the best you can do is go to a hospital or an allergist who is going to stick pins in your skin with all these different allergens. They do it on a grid and see how you react. You have to kill your entire day to find out. Well, if we can do the same test on an area that was smaller than one-inch, we could do it mail a patch to you that you put on and then the patch gets the information automatically, I just saved you a whole day.

That’s worth a lot. You reduce the inconvenience, you increase the precision with which it is done, and in a smaller area you can test a lot more allergens. You have to release these things in very small quantities because otherwise you can trigger a bad reaction. Well, this technique allows you to put a lot of different compounds into a small area and release small amounts. It’s compact and you can easily ship them. There is that potential.  

HLM: What’s next?

Shtein: Our main thing is developing technologies that are ultimately going to help people. We are not just playing in the sandbox in isolation, so the faster we can do it the better.

John Commins is a content specialist and online news editor for HealthLeaders, a Simplify Compliance brand.


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