Abstract
Pharmaceutical applications of 3D printing technologies are growing rapidly. Among these, vat photopolymerisation (VP) techniques, including Stereolithography (SLA) hold much promise for their potential to deliver personalised medicines on-demand. SLA 3D printing offers advantageous features for pharmaceutical production, such as operating at room temperature and offering an unrivaled printing resolution. However, since conventional SLA apparatus are designed to operate with large volumes of a single photopolymer resin, significant throughput limitations remain. This, coupled with the limited choice of biocompatible polymers and photoinitiators available, hold back the pharmaceutical development using such technologies. Hence, the aim of this work was to develop a novel SLA apparatus specifically designed to allow rapid and efficient screening of pharmaceutical photopolymer formulations. A commercially available SLA apparatus was modified by designing and fabricating a novel resin tank and build platform able to 3D print up to 12 different formulations at a single time, reducing the amount of sample resin required by 20-fold. The novel SLA apparatus was subsequently used to conduct a high throughput screening of 156 placebo photopolymer formulations. The efficiency of the equipment and formulation printability outcomes were evaluated. Improved time and cost efficiency by 91.66% and 94.99%, respectively, has been confirmed using the modified SLA apparatus to deliver high quality, highly printable outputs, thus evidencing that such modifications offer a robust and reliable tool to optimize the throughput and efficiency of vat photopolymerisation techniques in formulation development processes, which can, in turn, support future clinical applications.
Highlights
Three-dimensional (3D) printing is defined as a set of manufacturing technologies used to make parts by adding material in a layer-by-layer fashion [1]
SLA twelve apparatus was the design of twelve resin compartments and a build platform featuring separate build areas
The dimensions lected to submersion be the minimum dimensions to allow for tablet printing and resin-depth changes upon of the printing platform
Summary
Three-dimensional (3D) printing is defined as a set of manufacturing technologies used to make parts by adding material in a layer-by-layer fashion [1]. Interest has aroused fast and, so far, several 3D-printing technologies have been used, understood, and improved [2], and particular emphasis has been posed on its potential applications in delivering personalised medicine [3]. The recently FDA-approved T19 rheumatoid arthritis drug, designed as a chronotherapeutic drug delivery system targeting the circadian symptoms of the disease, achieves its particular release profile thanks to the complex inner geometry fabricated through 3D printing [5].
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