If clinically feasible, the medicine-as-a-service concept could ‘revolutionize the industry with personalized medicine,’ says company founder
On-demand, 3D-printed personalized medications may soon become a new tool for hospitals and pharmacies. That is if CurifyLabs and Natural Machines are successful in their recently announced collaboration to build 3D-printers for personalized medication formulations that can be deployed in a typical hospital or pharmacy settings.
“With this partnership, we are developing a unique Medicine-as-a-Service concept for pharmacy compounding and we believe that our partnership with Natural Machines will bring an affordable and superior 3D-printing platform to the market,” said Charlotta Topelius, Founder and CEO of CurifyLabs, in a press release. “Together we can revolutionize the industry within personalized medicine offering localized, on-demand drug manufacturing.”
CurifyLabs is a personalized drug manufacturing company based in Helsinki, Finland. Natural Machines specializes in creating technology to 3D-print ingestible products and is based in Barcelona, Spain. The two companies expect their combined pharmaceutical and specialized 3D-printing knowledge will provide them with a distinct advantage as they develop personalized medicine formulation technologies.
3D-Printed Personalized Pharmaceuticals
3D-printing for medications has gained more attention in recent years. For personalized healthcare, precision medicine calls for medical treatments that are tailored to individual patient or specific healthcare populations.
How 3D-printing technologies for medications could be in hospitals and pharmacies varies. One way is to automate the process of compounding drugs that must currently be manually compounded. 3D-printing also could be used to condense an individual’s medication regimen into a single pill, according to the two companies.
“At Natural Machines, we have solutions for the food sector and the personal care industry, and now with this strategic partnership, we add the pharmaceutical field,” said Lynette Kucsma, Founder and CMO of Natural Machines. “This partnership will leverage both CurifyLabs’ experience and latest developments in pharma with our extensive 3D-printing expertise, providing a new solution that aligns with the growing global trend of product personalization.”
The two companies expect their partnership to quickly complete development of a personalized medicine 3D-printer that will be available to hospital pharmacies globally this year, according to the joint announcement.
Single Medication With Multiple Drugs Personalized Based on Patients’ Medical Needs
The implications of 3D-printing technology for personalized medicine formulation gained more widespread recognition in April of 2021. This is when a significant study on the topic of a new method of creating 3D-printed medications was published in the International Journal of Pharmaceutics, titled, “Customizable Drug Tablets With Constant Release Profiles Via 3D Printing Technology.”
The new approach enabled multiple medications taken at varying frequencies during the day to be taken as a single pill. We covered this development in “Hospital Pharmacies May Soon Be Able to Use 3D Printers to Make Customized, Patient-Specific Medications.”
“Conceptually, [precision medicine] can allow the medical practitioner to prescribe a single medication that consists of a combination of multiple drugs based on the patient’s characteristics with a suitable dosage and release profile,” the researchers wrote at the time. “In this way, the combination of drugs in a single tablet needs to be taken only once, instead of taking multiple pills together and at different times in a day.”
The collaboration between Natural Machines and CurifyLabs is set to make this innovative technology commercially available to hospitals. By staying abreast of developments in personalized medication formulation technologies, healthcare leaders can ensure that they are providing patients with the best personalized treatment options.
—Caleb Williams
Related Information:
Customizable Drug Tablets With Constant Release Profiles Via 3D Printing Technology