Recent advances in 3D and 4D printing in pharmaceutical technology: applications, challenges, and future perspectives

Background

The conventional drug delivery devices always present a “one-size-fits-all” approach which limits their application in pharmaceutical industry, because of their inability to adapt to individual pharmacokinetic features. Three-dimensional (3D) printing is the most economical substitutes for transferring from the “one-size-fits-all” approach (i.e., mass production) to fabricate small individualized batches.

Main text

3D printing, advanced by the additive manufacturing technology, has gained growing demanding and popularity to develop pharmaceutical dosage forms and medical devices; and offered much more preferences over the traditional fabrication technologies. This advanced technology presents the ability of fabricating customizable design, 3D structures with sophisticated architecture, intended for personalized treatment. As a further advancement, the emergence of four-dimensional (4D) printing extensively contributed to the advancement of personalized medication by combining the benefits of smart multiple functional materials with the 3D printing technology. In spite of all of the offered notable progresses in both techniques, some regulatory issues, scalability, and production cost present key obstruction.

Conclusions

In the present article, an overview on the latest research articles demonstrating some step forward accomplishments for exploiting 3D and 4D printing technologies in developing advanced pharmaceutical dosage forms, medical devices, and tissue engineering as well as presenting the foremost challenges and future perspectives.

Graphical abstract