How 3D Printing Speeds Up Drug Production

Additive manufacturing allows pharma and biotech companies to take advantage of 3D printing technology to produce medications in a variety of dosages while achieving reliably consistent results. A major benefit of the process is the speed in which its able to produce a prototype and then shift to broad manufacturing.

Aprecia Pharmaceuticals is one of the key manufacturers using this technology. Aside from this, the company is also a 100% US-based manufacturer, which provides them with a unique benefit in the current ecosystem.

In April of this year, President Trump announced 100% tariffs on imported branded medications (with exceptions made for specific countries that negotiated their own tariff agreements). This is part of an ongoing push from President Trump to bring manufacturing back to the United States across all industries, including the pharma industry.

Kyle Smith, president and chief operating officer at Aprecia, spoke with Pharmaceutical Executive about the company’s additive manufacturing process as well as the benefits and challenges of 100% US-based manufacturing.

Pharmaceutical Executive: How can 3D printing technology speed up US drug production?
Kyle Smith: What we do from the start is take a well-characterized system, so we can understand what the design space is in terms of the powders, liquids that we're using, compatibility issues. We're able to map these things out before we start the process, and we have a good understanding of critical process parameters and the target product profile that a client would be shooting for.

There's a lot of work that we can get done ahead of time before you hit the machine and actually develop the product and have a high level of confidence that what we plan to manufacture is going to be successful just based on all the knowledge and the incredible amount of data that we've been able to capture.

Once we're actually on the machine, we have a lot of process analytical technology, such as NIR probes, cameras, laser cameras, and we're looking at the content of the powder that goes in, the amount of powder that goes into any tablet, the amount of liquid that goes into any tablet, and the content of that liquid. That's a lot of data points for any one tablet.

We can have 22 data points in real time as it's being built layer by layer, and that can be tracked back to the individual tablet. Rather than running a batch or a set of batches, sending material off to the lab, and waiting for analytical testing( which often can be a delay and take time as the lab gets built up with kind of the queue), we're able to get all this data in real time and track it back to individual cavity.

We can make quicker decisions based on real time quality and in process analytics, and then you can move on to the next set of experiments. You're able to rapidly iterate through, just based on the data collection and the sensors that we have on the machines that give us real-time feedback on the quality of the products.