| Project Detail |
Personalised drug formulation is a hot topic but state of the art approaches are limited by low scalability, cost, and regulatory hurdles, while current polypill formulation efforts are hindered by liquid form or hot melt addition approaches, posing stability issues.
These bottlenecks carry a great societal price, as the synergic boost of drug combinations was recently demonstrated to reach significant improvement in treatment outcomes, while keeping active substances in the ideal physiological concentration window is known to maximise efficiency and reduce side effects. Also, polypharmacy is a real problem leading to dosing errors and significant loss in patient adherence. Finally, while Big Data Health IT system concepts on the far horizon hold potential to gather the large amount of reliable dosage-patient data required for evidence-based personalised medicine, the technology to deliver such data – well-tracked patient/dosing procedures with bi-directional digital information flow – is missing.
The PERAMEDIC project proposes to resolve these problems with a breakthrough solution: a stand-alone drug formulation system for personalised medicine, offering locally prepared, individually customised, segmented release polypills, with an inherently digital technology interface. The system relies on integrating several novel technologies: personal release profiles, in situ 3D printing of release matrix using adaptive toolpaths, and ultra-precise multichannel powder dosing of drugs into sealed microcompartments. The envisaged device would be a desktop-size pill/capsule printing machine, using canisters of powdered drugs and bioresorbable polymer matrix material. Application scenarios would be first clinical settings, then at later stage, pharmacy locations and medical practices such as GP’s office.
PERAMEDIC will deliver a lab-scale proof-of-concept prototype system of the functionally combined novel technologies, with a preview design of the future technology. |
