Collaboration to produce 3D screen printed pharmaceuticals

Hovione, a contract development and manufacturing organisation (CDMO) and Laxxon Medical, a pharma-tech company will collaborate to advance 3D screen printing technologies for the pharmaceutical industry.

Under the agreement, Hovione will establish Laxxon’s 3D screen printing technology at Hovione’s current good manufacturing practice (cGMP) production sites first in Portugal and later in the US.

The technology is an additive manufacturing process which enables the development and production of complex formulations and geometrical structures of oral dosage forms to optimise the release profiles of common pharmaceuticals in addition to new drug developments.

Advantages of the 3D technology include:

• The potential to produce unique or customised dosage forms with characteristics that cannot be achieved with conventional dosage forms
• Ability to create tablets of any shape and size
• The option to easily adjust the number of active substances and individual components in the composition of the tablet and even to set the dosage individually for each patient for personalised medicines.

“The technology… allows for drug products with complex shapes and structures as well as unique API release characteristics but it also has the potential to reduce the time and cost of drug development,” Dr Jean-Luc Herbeaux, Hovione´s CEO explained.

With this long-term partnership, the platform will be available from early development phases to routine commercial manufacturing.

Laxxon’s CEO Helmut Kerschbaumer shared that the company is looking forward to the partnership facilitating innovation through 3D screen printing. He added that industrialising the 3D printing technology will enable it to be “accessible to a greater number of pharmaceutical and medical device companies.”