3D printer adapted to print drugs

A professor, described as a 'one-man catalyst', has taken a commercially available 3D printer and adapted it to inject organic-based inks into tube-like structures to create the new home-grown version of a pill, the Daily Mail reports.

Professor Lee Cronin, of Glasgow University, points out that most drugs are a combination of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, and that “with a printer, it should be possible that with a relatively small number of inks you can make any organic molecule”.

The real beauty of Cronin's prototype system, however, is that it allows the printer not only to control the sequences and exact calibration of inks, but also to shape, from a tested blueprint, the environment in which those reactions take place, The Guardian writes.

The scale and architecture of the miniature printed "lab" could be pre-programmed into software and downloaded for use with a standard set of inks. In this way, not only the combinations of reactants, but also the ratios and speed at which they combine, could be ingrained into the system, simply by changing the size of reaction chambers and their relation with one another; Cronin calls this "reactionware" or, because it depends on a conceptualised sequence of flow and reorientation in a 3D space, "Rubik's Cube chemistry".

His team is currently trying to build simple drugs with a 3D printer that only costs £1 200, Web Pro News notes.

So far, they have been able to build simple inorganic molecules inside reaction chambers. The next step is attempting to create something simple, like Ibuprofen. Cronin notes that if they succeed, they'll be able to print just about any drug.