I-Corps: Transforming Personalized Medicine With Printed Medicine

Purdue University, West Lafayette IN

Investigators

Abstract

The broader impact / commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to completely transform personalized medicine. With this technology in a compounding pharmacy or hospital clinical pharmacy, a patient can be prescribed a one-off combination of drug substances in limited quantities, customized for their individual physiology, and the pharmacy can produce such a custom-made product to high quality specifications for that patient within minutes. Patients can be either human or animal, as these challenges exist in both human and animal health. The long-term beneficial consequences of the work proposed will include that : (1) patients will attain stable dosage amounts in hours rather than months; (2) challenging patient subpopulations will have available products tailor-made to their metabolism; (3) known life-saving drugs which hitherto could not be commercialized because of severe shelf life limitations can become viable; and (4) both personalized medicine and pharmaceutical product supply chain will be transformed. This I-Corps project enables personalized medicine. The technology is analogous to an inkjet printer, printing precise quantities of medicine on substrates such as tablets and capsules. Our past research has proven precision printing to be well-matched to pharmaceutical production applications. High-precision microfluidics and process analytical technology have been used to validate both the quantity and quality of pharmaceutical products made by printing, and the proof of concept is well-established. Precision of better than 1% relative standard deviation at the stringent individual dose level is routinely achieved. This project will cause broader adoption of precision production, additive manufacturing, just-in-time production, applied microfluidics, and advanced process management.