The pharmaceutical industry is set to join the fourth industrial revolution with the 3D printing of medicines. The application of 3D printers in compounding pharmacies will turn them into digital pharmacies, wrapping up the telemedicine care cycle and definitively modifying the pharmacotherapeutic treatment of patients. Fused deposition modeling 3D printing technology melts extruded drug-loaded filaments into any dosage form; and allows the obtainment of flexible dosages with different shapes, multiple active pharmaceutical ingredients and modulated drug release kinetics—in other words, offering customized medicine. This work aimed to present an update on this technology, discussing its challenges. The co-participation of the pharmaceutical industry and compounding pharmacies seems to be the best way to turn this technology into reality. The pharmaceutical industry can produce drug-loaded filaments on a large scale with the necessary quality and safety guarantees; while digital pharmacies can transform the filaments into personalized medicine according to specific prescriptions. For this to occur, adaptations in commercial 3D printers will need to meet health requirements for drug products preparation, and it will be necessary to make advances in regulatory gaps and discussions on patent protection. Thus, despite the conservatism of the sector, 3D drug printing has the potential to become the biggest technological leap ever seen in the pharmaceutical segment, and according to the most optimistic prognostics, it will soon be within reach.

The production process of 3D-printed drugs offers unique advantages such as the possibility of individualizing the drug therapy and easily associating different drugs and release technologies in the same pharmaceutical unit. Fused deposition modeling, a 3D printing technique, seems especially interesting for pharmaceutical applications, due to its low cost, precise and reproducible control of the printed structures, and versatility for industrial and laboratory scale. This technique combined with another technology already adapted for the pharmaceutical industry, the hot melt extrusion, is able to incorporate various mechanisms of modified drug release. This special report aims to bring together data of the experimental progress achieved using the fused deposition modeling 3D printing combined with hot melt extrusion technique and its potential in drug delivery. [Formula: see text].