Drop-On-Demand Technology as a Manufacturing Platform for Personalized Medicine

With the advent and completion of the human genome project researchers are predicting that personalized medicine can be used to target specific ailments and disease populations. Although personalized medicine has the potential to revolutionize healthcare, currently there exists no platform for mass manufacturing of “personalized” drugs due to the lack of available technology at many large scale pharmaceutical manufacturing plants. This problem exemplifies the need for building a bridge between traditional engineering and biomedical research. A viable solution is to utilize Drop on Demand (DoD) technology in conjunction with ink jet printing. Applied to precision dosage formulation, ink jet technology can be used to drop accurate dosages of drug formulation onto biopolymeric substrates to create functional and convenient drug delivery systems. The goal of this research is to develop an automated manufacturing platform which can be used for precision dosage and controlled drug delivery in personalized medicine.