Gas-assisted dynamic co-extrusion

Unmet Need: Scalable and high-throughput fabrication of personalized medicines

In order to avoid dosage errors and adverse drug reactions for people taking multiple medications for co-occurring diseases, personalized medicines was introduced. This offered treatment of a patient by manufacturing proper drugs at the appropriate dosage via additive manufacturing and delivering to the right location at the right time. However, one of the major barriers hindering the deployment is lack of a scalable and high-throughput manufacturing process to fabricate personalized drugs on-demand at the point-of-care in a timely and cost effective manner.

The Technology: Free-form co-axial extrusion of core-shell structures with assisted gas

Researchers at WSU present a dynamic gas assisted co-extrusion process as the scalable freeform manufacturing platform to fabricate custom core-shell drugs for personalized medication. Personalized medicines have three components to it, namely the pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), the core on to which the APIs are loaded and the shell with encapsulates the core and controls the drug release kinetics, such as delayed or sustained release mode in order to protect the core from early dissolution during the digestion process. WSU researchers introduce an adjustable flow rate ratio in a free-from manufacturing process to fabricate drugs and custom dosages on-demand via controlling the variation in the core and shell diameters and shell thickness as per the variations in the dosages.

Applications:

Fabrication of medicines with custom dosages on-demand.

Advantages:

Local fabrication of medicine at the point of care on demand.
Scalable and high-throughput manufacturing process.
Better patient outcomes, improved patient safety through reduced adverse drug effects.
Reduced excessive drug wastage.
This method can be extended to other co-extrusion based manufacturing processes.