Using Brinter® bioprinter for Drug Printing

products-servicesBrinter Ltd.
August 22nd 2022

Brinter® 3D bioprinting opens the door to an entirely new approach to drug manufacturing that is far more in tune with a 21st-century vision of digitally integrated pharma value chains and highly personalized medicines.

This is an ‘any time, anywhere’ approach to producing drugs tailored to individual patient needs, allowing size, dose, appearance, and rate of drug delivery all to be precisely specified for each small batch.

Medication challenges

Conventional pharmaceutical tableting processes first introduced in the 19th century are still cost-effective for large-scale production but are inherently time-consuming, labour intensive, and dose inflexible due to the large batch sizes needed to justify investment in expensive machinery.

Tablets are usually mass-manufactured in a few discrete strengths, often based on the dose required for a suitable effect in the majority of the population. However, it is evident that one dose might not fit all; requirements can vary based on a patient’s genetic profile, disease state, gender, age, and weight.

Nor are traditional manufacturing processes ideal for early-phase drug development and clinical trials, where the dose flexibility needs to be varied according to study needs.

Bioprinted medicines solution

3D bioprinting allows the individualization of medication according to the needs of the patients, their genetic profile, as well as their health condition. Bioprinting can revolutionize the way that tablets are manufactured, and thus, move medical treatment away from a “one size fits all” approach towards personalized medicines.

The flexibility and configurability of the bioprinting process allow several factors like the size, dose, appearance, and rate of drug delivery to be controlled and easily varied.

3D bioprinted drug prototypes may provide an increased understanding during early drug development decreasing time-to-market and the risks of nonadaptation.

A 3D bioprinter can be used for drug printing anywhere in the world as long as the ingredients are on hand, radically cutting costs of shipping and tariffs. It also enables on-demand dispensing in various settings, such as pharmacies and hospital wards, for improved medicine access, reduced wastage, and accelerated discharge times from hospitals.

Drug Formulation and microfluidics

Tablets and other oral dosage forms can be bioprinted with alternating sizes and shapes to realize varying release kinetics to avoid the inherently time-consuming, labour-intensive and dose-inflexible conventional pharmaceutical manufacturing processes and conduct research and development of personalized therapeutic drug formulations.

The science of microfluidics (altering the behaviour of fluids through micro-channels and manufacturing microminiaturized devices containing chambers and tunnels through which fluids flow or are confined) can be used to design highly customized ‘smart drugs’ medicines, manufactured with unprecedented precision.

Bioprinting is also ideal for nanoparticle fabrication and producing prototype batches to support proof-of-concept studies and formulation tests.

Multi-Material Printing

Brinter® is able to combine several different printing technologies into a single print job.

This makes it possible to print controlled drug delivery devices and formulations having, for example, an outer shell of one material filled with multiple active pharmaceutical components.

Fast Iteration In Formulations

Brinter® allows individual printing parameters to be set separately for each tablet within a single print job.

This results in adjustable pharmacokinetics. This feature accelerates the iteration process of finding optimal drug product formulations.

Matching Bioprinter to drug printing applications

3D bioprinting is a fast-evolving and revolutionary technology in which each new study and application needs to feed back into design and in which each individual bioprinter platform needs to be configurable to specific user needs.

This has inspired the highly modular Brinter® approach to design and fabrication in which each Brinter® Bioprinter is effectively custom-built and infinitely adaptable with a wide choice of individual tools and features.

The Brinter® platform can be fitted with a wide array of proprietary fluidic controllers, actuators, high-frequency solenoids and valves, with precision sensors to control multiple flow parameters and manipulate multiple fluids individually for active mixing, flow focusing, sorting, and structure generation.

This creates a highly adaptable bioprinter platform that can be used as a versatile tool for 3D printing a wide variety of drug forms.

Drug printing Brinter® technologies

Depending on the specific application, different combinations of Brinter® technologies can be used. The most relevant to drug printing, with its emphasis on controlling flows of a wide range of liquids and gels, include:

  • Pneuma Cooled print head: Pneumatic print head with cooling for printing low to medium viscosity hydrogels, silicones and pastes, such as collagen or Matrigel.
  • Pneuma Pro print head: Pneumatic print head with heating for printing low to medium viscosity hydrogels, silicones and pastes, such as hydrogels with living cells at +37 °C.
  • Granu Tool print head: enables hot extrusion of small granules of thermoplastic material or mixtures of a thermoplastic binder with powder fillers. The extrusion barrel and the nozzle can be heated up to +250 °C.
  • Visco Tool print head: An endless piston principle tool that enables accurate printing of various viscous fluids and pastes, such as bioinks, biopaste, silicone, acrylate, epoxy resin, light-curing adhesives, waxes, ceramics, and abrasive pastes.
  • Visco Tool Bio print head: An endless piston principle print head, which guarantees extrusion of constant volume per revolution together with a near zero dead volume. This precision technology leads to perfect contours, fine lines, and clean start and endpoints. The single-use cartridge and the rotor and piston are replaced after each dispensing procedure; hence there is no danger of cross-contamination, making this print head ideal for biological applications.
  • Heated & cooled print bed: Providing a temperature-controlled environment for the printed structure.
  • MicroDroplet print head: Solenoid valve actuated dosing system enabling precision dosing of droplets from 10 μL to 1000 μL, including dispensing various liquids, such as cell suspension, cell media, drugs, growth factors, and crosslinking agents.

Resources

Click on BioPrinting Applications for further information.
Click on Benefits of Bioprinting for further information.

CORPORATE BROCHURE

Brinter® One - A Modular 3D Bioprinter

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Using Brinter® bioprinter for Drug Printing

Brinter® One drug printing set up featuring (1) Visco Tool heated print head, (2) Granu Tool print head for hot extrusion of small granules of thermoplastic or thermoplastic binder with powder fillers, (3). Heated and cooled print bed to provide a temperature-controlled environment for printed structure, and (4) MicroDroplet print head for precision dosing of droplets from 10 µL to 1000 µL to form drugs.

Using Brinter® bioprinter for Drug Printing