Digital light processing 3D printing of Hydrochlorothiazide with modified release

Additive manufacturing also known as 3D printing gains more attention in scientific research due to its great advantages in simple and fast producing custom-designed products. 3D models created with computer-aided design (CAD) are presented to the printers and with different techniques, printing layer-by-layer desired products are made. Most used techniques in additive manufacturing are fused deposition modeling (FDM), material and ink jetting, sintering and vat polymerization techniques. Stereolithography (SLA) and digital light processing (DLP) are the most frequently used techniques in vat polymerization due to their advantages. In DLP technique, a digital micromirror is used for gradually exposing and solidifying a layer of liquid photopolymer solution following a layer-by-layer mechanism (Adamov et al., 2022; Zhu et al., 2020). Nowadays additive manufacturing finds its place in medicine by producing medical devices, implants, prostheses and medical equipment. 3D printing has enormous potential in personalized medicine as a result of different possibilities in production of dosage forms with desired shapes that contain one or more active compounds that can have different release profiles. 3D printing helps in overcoming the problem with permeability and solubility of some drugs and enables using drugs from different BCS classes. On that hand the aim of this study was to manufacture 3D printed tablets (printlets) with hydrochlorothiazide (HHT) as active pharmaceutical ingredient. HHT is commonly used in the treatment of high blood pressure and has low solubility, low permeability, exhibiting poor oral absorption (BCS Class IV) which makes it suitable as a model drug for 3D printlets.