An Ingestible QR Code that Helps Deliver Tailored Medication
3D printers are all the rage in design and manufacturing circles right now. And the general media seem to be enamoured of this technology too, with reports of 3D printers being used for anything from cutting the costs of prototype production to making pizzas for astronauts to developing a frickin’ beatin’ heart .
Inkjet printing is undoubtedly very attractive material deposition and patterning technology thereby receiving such significant attention in the recent years. It has been exploited in biology even, for novel applications including high throughput screening, pharmaceutical formulations, medical devices and implants. Moreover, inkjet printing has been implemented in cutting-edge 3D-printing healthcare areas such as tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.
Now, in a similar application, it has been used to design and develop edible QR codes which could on enable a new method for the production of medicine- one that can be tailored to fit each patient and has the potential to protect against wrong medication and fake medicine according to researchers at the University of Copenhagen.
Natalja Genina, assistant professor at the
Department of Pharmacy, said, “This technology is promising because the medical drug can be dosed exactly the way you want it to. This gives an opportunity to tailor the medication according to the patient getting it.”The idea is for patients to be able to use their smartphones to scan the edible QR code and find out information about the medication they are about to take. The patient’s name, drug administration route, expiration date, manufacturer ID and batch number will all be embedded in the QR code.
The study noted that additional information could be included based on the national legislation. Making it a scannable QR code could also reduce the chances of people taking the wrong medication, or tricked into taking fake or expired drugs. These situations will be even easier to avoid once the team determines how to get an everyday inkjet printer to apply the medicine as a QR code.
In the future the researchers hope the edible substrate can be produced and sent to medical centers, and that the medicinal ink itself will be printable on standard inkjet printers. If different medicines were loaded into the printer as different colors, it should even be possible to mix customized drug “cocktails” through software.
Professor Jukka Rantanen, fellow researcher on the study, said, “If we are successful with applying this production method to relatively simple printers, then it can enable the innovative production of personalized medicine and rethinking of the whole supply chain.”
