One for all
How to make one of many different pills and take it once a day
Alexandra "Renoire" Alekseeva, XX2 century
With the advent of "polytablets", first aid kits-organizers will remain in the past.
If a person needs to take several pills every day at different times, and he has problems with memory or organization, then for sure he will periodically skip the reception and thereby worsen his condition. Recently, an inexpensive method has been invented by which you can group tablets into one, and all the necessary substances in the course of a single intake will be delivered to the bloodstream at the right time.
As the population ages and the number of people with chronic diseases grows, there are more and more people in the world who are forced to take several pills a day at different times of the day, and a delay of several hours or a missed appointment can have an unpleasant effect on the quality of life. Unfortunately, not everyone has enough self-organization to follow the schedule, especially people suffering from dementia. And it would be great if these people could take only one tablet a day, which would contain the right amount of different medications delivered to the bloodstream at the right time.
Tablets usually release active substances into the body when the stomach destroys their outer shell. If you design a tablet in a tricky way, then you can make it have several layers. Then the drugs will be released sequentially until the entire tablet is absorbed by the body. Such a system will also allow you to control the start time of absorption of each drug – this can be achieved by thickening the layer shell or, conversely, making it thinner.
Multilayer tablets are already used in medical practice – mainly for the treatment of type II diabetes, high blood pressure and heart problems. But the "polytablets" have one drawback – their standardized versions do not always help different patients equally. Someone does not need something from the standard set, and someone may need other proportions of medicines. In turn, the production of personalized "polytablets" using conventional pharmaceutical technologies is very expensive, which is why they can only be produced in very small quantities. It will be much cheaper to print them on a 3D printer.
Some printed tablets have already been approved by the FDA, but these were mono-, not polytablets. In addition, approved 3D-printed medicines consist of a water-soluble substance, and many medicines are insoluble in water. Medications should either be easily absorbed by the body immediately after ingestion, or they have to be pre-dissolved in water. And this condition imposes certain restrictions on printed polytablets – since their shells must be easily soluble.
Printer for printing polytablets.
Researchers from the University of Birmingham (University of Birmingham) recently published a paper that investigated the applicability in 3D printing technologies of materials previously used to deliver water-insoluble substances into the bloodstream. Such materials are known as "surfactant-polyelectrolyte complexes". These substances have the consistency of a gel and because of their chemical properties cannot be dissolved in water.
Surfactant molecules consist of two parts, and one of them is easily mixed with water, and the other is not mixed. And this means that surfactants, when placed in water, are most often grouped with other similar molecules in such a way that the parts that do not mix with water are closed from it by the second side of the molecules. And such structures can store active substances inside themselves.
Surfactants considered in the study had a negative charge, and polymers (electrolytes) – positive. When polymers and Surfactants were in contact, they were attracted to each other, and formed surfactant-polyelectrolyte complexes, that is, they formed a 3D system containing the active substance.
To produce such complexes, the researchers printed out various layers of polyelectrolyte and surfactants on a 3D printer. Such layers can be further used to form a multi-layered polytablet with different medications.
Although much has already been done towards the development of this technology, such a new form of drug delivery still has a long way to go before it is approved for use in medical practice. The approval process may take about five years, as clinical trials will need to be conducted. And maybe after that people will be able to take one pill a day instead of many.
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