Thermal Inkjet Printing: Prospects and Applications in the Development of Medicine

Over the last 10 years, inkjet printing technologies have advanced significantly and found several applications in the pharmaceutical and biomedical sector. Thermal inkjet printing is one of the most widely used techniques due to its versatility in the development of bioinks for cell printing or biosensors and the potential to fabricate personalized medications of various forms such as films and tablets. In this review, we provide a comprehensive discussion of the principles of inkjet printing technologies highlighting their advantages and limitations. Furthermore, the review covers a wide range of case studies and applications for precision medicine.

Introduction

Over the last 20 years, we have encountered a transformation in manufacturing technologies in the area of medicinal products [1–3]. Traditionally marketed medicines are manufactured at fixed doses (one size fits all) targeting a large number of patients in order to reduce the production costs and time to the market. However, the widely varied responses to a particular therapeutic dose in patient populations especially for medicines with narrow therapeutic windows points out the limitations of generalized mass manufacturing [1,4]. Moreover, there is a growing number of patients worldwide with chronic diseases who have to take multiple doses of medicines per day, called polypharmacy,
which increases the risk for side effects and drug–disease interactions [5]. Currently, swift advances in gene sequencing technology along with increased knowledge of genomics and better understanding of diseases on molecular level coupled with the use of toxicogenomic markers have opened a door for personalized medicine that will possibly bring a revolution in the conventional treatment approaches as well as in pharmaceutical industry [6–9].
For the materialization of these advances in personalized medicines, a wide range of 2D and 3D printing technologies have been introduced as appropriate for manufacturing print-on-demand medicinal products. Inkjet printing (IJP) technology is considered an ideal approach as it is cost effective [1,10–14] with high precision, repeatability, robustness, and high-throughput (Figure 1). Due to its wide applicability, inkjet printing has been extensively used for pharmaceutical applications and tissue engineering [15–24].

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Uddin, M.J.; Hassan, J.; Douroumis, D. Thermal Inkjet Printing: Prospects and Applications in the Development of Medicine. Technologies 2022, 10, 108. https://doi.org/10.3390/technologies10050108