Programming of drug release via rolling‐up of patterned biopolymer films

Abstract

Continuous progress of personalized medicine is insistently calling the pharmaceutical sector to increase product variability more than ever before. One of the challenges consists in personalization of the drug release rates and doses from drug‐containing media. Herein is introduced an innovative methodology which resolves this problem by combining inkjet printing and rolling up procedure, allowing for the production of capsules with tailorable distributions of medical compounds. The prototype capsules consist of rolled‐up polymeric films over which fluorescent probes have been deposited via inkjet printing prior to rolling. The position of the probes inside the capsules are determined by the printed 2D pattern. The delay and the rate of the release of the probes in dissolution media can be shaped by the number of rolls and the position of the drug reservoir on the polymeric film before rolling. The innovative method proposed in the paper paves the way to a novel family of drug delivery devices with a broad range of therapeutic applications and it stands alongside other additive manufacturing techniques but allows to avoid their usual constraints.

Biphasic Drug Release from Rolled-Up Gelatin Capsules with a Cylindrical Cavity

“…This manual approach was sufficiently precise to provide good reproducibility of the kinetics, which was adequate to meet the objectives of the present study. For potential clinical applications, a more automated fabrication protocol using materials inkjet printing [15] would be preferable, but it should be adapted for rapid printing of sufficiently large quantities of the real drugs.…”

“…However, to the best of our knowledge, this device did not find broad acceptance, probably because it was limited to the case of the erosion-controlled release, which seems to not be well suited for realizing well-defined reproducible kinetics due to the complexity and irregularity of the erosion process. Recently, we explored the rolling-up approach for programmed release, controlled either by longitudinal swelling of a chitosan fiber, embedded in a hydrophobic polydimethylsiloxane matrix [14], or by diffusion in the radial direction across the consecutive layers of the scroll of chitosan acetate film [15]. Therefore, the present work combines the previous findings on the swelling and diffusion-controlled SR from the rolled-up capsules with the idea of using the central cavity in the capsule for the QR.…”