EUROPEAN CONGRESS AND EXHIBITION ON ADVANCED MATERIALS AND PROCESSES - EUROMAT 2021

3D printing technologies for pharmaceutical manufacturing provide new opportunities for personalized medicine and on-demand tailored drug products, such as implants and other dosage forms. This work presents our recent achievements in developing a viable manufacturing process for printed personalized dosage forms onto thin films. Laser-Induced Forward Transfer (LIFT) printing technology has been successfully applied by means of a 355 nm, nanosecond laser to deposit active substances starting from solutions of varying concentration and viscosity. The main advantage of LIFT printing lies in the preparation of thin films as dosage forms, each with different designs, multiple actives and sizes. In the context of investigating the effectiveness of the LIFT printing, a Mass Spectrometry (MS)-based analytical technique was developed and applied for the study of paclitaxel printed with LIFT on two receiving substrates, namely thin potato starch and glass. The active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) quantification of the LIFT-printed dosage forms was confirmed using a High-Performance Liquid Chromatography tandem Mass Spectrometry (HPLC-MS/MS) analysis. The obtained thin films were characterized regarding their recovery, disintegration time and homogeneity. The final aim is to develop slow-release skin patches containing paclitaxel which can be applied transdermally.