Dropwise Additive Manufacturing of Pharmaceutical Products for Solvent-Based Dosage Forms

Orodispersible films: Towards drug delivery in special populations

“…An approach similar to solvent-based (inkjet) printing for molten ink formulations is being devolved by Reklaitis and colleagues (Reklaitis, n.d.;Hirshfield et al, 2014) . Briefly, dropon-demand (DoD) printing technology is used to deposit molten formulation drops onto edible films.…”

Personalised dosing: Printing a dose of one’s own medicine

“…It is important that drops land in their designated coordinate on the substrate, because otherwise dose uniformity cannot be assured. Ideally a satellite drop would recombine with the primary drop or fall not far away on the substrate (Shimoda, 1996;Hirshfield et al, 2014). Viscosity and surface tension also affect the refilling phase of the drop generator as the solution passes through spouts into the nozzle firing chambers (Bohórquez et al, 1994).…”

“…The surface tension should be high enough to enable the formation of spherical droplets and to resist leakage from the print head when the printer is not in operation. The viscosity should be low enough that the fluid can be jetted but sufficiently high that it is not ejected to early, which can lead to the formation of a tail, producing satellite droplets (Pardeike et al, 2011;Hirshfield et al, 2014). Satellite drops (also known as secondary drops) not only affect formation of the primary droplet, but may also impact the location of drug deposition on the substrate.…”

Drop-on-Demand System for Manufacturing of Melt-based Solid Oral Dosage: Effect of Critical Process Parameters on Product Quality

“…The process utilizes the drop-on-demand (DoD) inkjet printing technology for predictable and highly controllable deposition of active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) onto an edible substrate, such as a polymeric film or placebo tablet (9,10). This process uses fluid operations suitable for low-volume production of personalized dosage forms.…”

“…Using the developed dropwise additive manufacturing process for pharmaceuticals (DAMPP), different drug formulations including solventbased systems, i.e., solvent-polymer-API solutions, as well as melt-based systems, i.e., polymer-API melts, can be printed. Recently, Hirshfield et al (2014) (9) and Icten et al (2015) (10) reported proof of concept of dropwise additive manufacturing process for solvent-based applications and for melt-based applications, respectively. Melt-based printing applications eliminate the solvent evaporation step after drop deposition and thus allow on-demand production of individual dosage forms with good control of drug solid state and morphology.…”