(281c) 3D Printed Dosage Development for Personalized Delivery of Nanodrugs to Pediatric Population

Children are not “little adults,” which makes delivery of drugs to pediatric population challenging. Personalized delivery of drugs is especially pertinent as drug dose must be adjusted based on age and body weight of the pediatric patients. Besides ensuring efficacy, safety, and compliance, drug dosage must be pediatric-friendly, pain-free, and accurate. Unfortunately, traditional pharmaceutical solid and liquid dosages do not meet all these requirements. Up to now, tablets 3D-printed by fused deposition modeling feel like “hard plastics” and the production method is limited to a small class of thermally non-labile drugs. Finally, a great majority of the drug candidates in the pipeline of pharmaceutical companies are poorly soluble, whose delivery poses additional challenges. In this study, we present a robust formulation–process platform for direct ink writing (DIW) of soft nanodrug tablets that allow personalized delivery of poorly soluble drugs to pediatric population. Nanodrug suspensions prepared by wet media milling process are formulated into 3D printable inks. Ink rheology is correlated with ink flow and printability. 3D printed tablets with mechanical behavior comparable to commercially available gummies are selected, and further characterized for intra and inter content uniformity. Multi-material printing is used to create tablets with spatially controlled formulations. Multiple tablet designs are used to control API release kinetics. Overall, our robust and optimized 3D printing process–ink formulation can enable accelerated fabrication of personalized tablets composed of poorly soluble drugs.