Personalized medicines tailored to an individual's needs may be produced onsite and on-demand in a matter of seconds with 3D printing technology.

The photopolymerization system advanced by researchers from Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (Spain), University College London (U.K.), FabRx Ltd. (U.K.) and MERLIN Institute for Technology Inspired Regenerative Medicine (Netherlands) processes a resin containing dissolved drugs and a photoreactive chemical that can be solidified by light during printing to form a tablet. The resin is extruded layer-by-layer to form the desired object by manipulating the light in a highly controlled way.

The new vat polymerization technique prints the entire object all at once, reducing the printing speed from multiple minutes to just seven to 17 seconds. Multiple images of the object viewed at different angles shine onto the resin until the light accumulated reaches a point at which polymerization occurs. By adjusting the intensity of light at different angles and overlaps, all points of the 3D object in the resin can reach this threshold at the same time, causing the entire 3D object to solidify simultaneously.

The research reported in Additive Manufacturing demonstrated the process by 3D-printing paracetamol as the model drug. The technology should be of value in the rapid and on-demand fabrication of pharmaceuticals and medical devices.