TechStuff Classic Printing: Medication

called Printing Medication. It's all about using printer technology to dispense medication, very similarly to how you would print a sheet of paper with an ink jet printer. I think it's a pretty fascinating subject. So let's listen in what to what Jonathan from the Past and his co host

Chris Polette had to say on the subject. Shall we let's talk a bit about what we're actually going to discuss today though, Yes, so today we wanted to talk about inkjet printers some other kinds of printers, but not printers in the way that you would traditionally use the printer, you know, I think about you would traditionally use a

printer to print text or graphics on a piece of paper. Yeah, yeah, we UM, we thought it would be kind of fun to talk about some technologies that could be used in other ways that people have sort of repurposed, if you will. And this is, uh, this is when we thought would be fun to talk about because, um, an inkjet printer is something we think of as a very everyday thing. You know, you've got a couple of different kinds of printers.

You've got an impact printer and a non impact printer. Basically, the differences the impact printers are like the old daisy wheels, where um, the printer actually hits the paper, It actually touches the paper in some way. And in this case that I was just mentioning, it's a daisy shaped Um, what would you call a print head? I guess that where the type you know, the actual letter goes through the ribbon. You know, it hits the ribbon and makes

an impression on the paper. Um. And then there were a series of non impact printers, which is you know, far more common day the laser printers, uh, the ink jet printers. UM, different types of technologies there, but you know they don't actually touch the paper itself except the parts that feed the paper, um, you know, through the right. So we wanted to talk today about how these sort of printers have been used in in very novel ways in the medical field. Yeah, and not just the ink

jet printers. But that's what we're gonna start off on because, uh, last year, this being back in February, HP announced the first application of its ink jet technology in a non traditional printing role, which was all about printing chemicals when the with the specific purpose of helping pharmaceutical companies develop new drugs. And so you suddenly had these inkjet printers that we're being uh tweaked so that instead of it being a printer printer, it's now a medicine dispenser in

a way. But to really get into the nitty gritty of this, we should probably talk about how a basic ink jet printer works. Now. It's, uh, it's the basic basics of it are pretty simple. I mean, you've got something that feeds the paper through the machine and something that sprays ink onto the page. Now right now, of course, if it just feeds the paper through and sprays the ink, you can have a covered piece of paper with nothing

on it. So you kind of have to have some way of making the you know, the stuff that you want to print show up the way you want it printed, the letters on the page of a letter or um. Uh, if you want to print a photo, you want the colors to appear in the in the right order, and you want everything to be nice and sharp and uh and and and have a good definition, and otherwise you

just kind of have this messy look. So you have to be able to make these drops really really really small, these drops of ink, because otherwise you would, you know, you would you would not be able to make those definitions between things like hard angles versus a soft curve, and uh, you know, all the fonts would look the same, and just you wouldn't be able to create something that looks crisp and clear. So the way in jet printers do this is they use hundreds of tiny, tiny, tiny

nozzles that spray out drops of ink that are incredibly small. Yeah. Now, I can tell you the first the first ink jet printer I ever owned was in the mid eighties. Specifically, um and uh, you know, there there are things that go into an inkjet printer's quality that that have improved significantly over this time. The ability to Uh, to spray that mixed the different colors to make other colors. UM. You know the basic four color printing process cyan, magenta,

yellow and black c M y K the K being black. UM. You know those those have gotten that the ability to to mix those has gotten so much more sophisticated. UM. There are other things that factor into it too that just that I want to mention, paper two has been has factored into this, to the brightness of the white paper if you're using white, or the absorption of the ink. UM. The technology for all of these things has improved significantly over the short time that we've done this, UM, but

the basic technology is still there. You've got a print head, UM, that is the part of the printer that's actually doing the printing. That's where all the nozzles are located. They're located on that print head, and of course the ink cartridges that go inside the printer that's supplying the ink. Obviously, the ink itself has gotten more sophisticated over over time, and in some cases, depending on the manufacturer and the technology behind it, UH, the print head may actually be

part of the cartridge itself. UM. You may have an ink at printer at home, and if you do, uh, you may have seen that it's got a little something that looks like a little circuit board on there. Well, and that may very well be the actual print head, but you need a way to get it to scan across the paper, and that's what you have in your

stepper motor. Basically, it's a part of the printer that drives across the paper, and the instructions that come from the computer to the printer tell the motor where to stop on the page that the print head can spray ink onto the paper. So we're talking about something that's really really precise because it has to be able to make incredibly tiny adjustments in order for these nozzles to spray the ink exactly where it needs to go, because you know, you're talking about a really tiny scale, like

on microns or even smaller. So these are really really tiny adjustments. And in fact, there's also a stabilizer bar that helps keep that that print head on the very even track it needs to be in order to do its work. And it's that's the basic part of the printer,

part of a of an inkjet printer. I mean, there's another entire section that involves pulling the paper through and feeding it through properly, which for the purposes of our discussion, really don't factor in because the medical variation of this doesn't use paper. It's not pulling paper through in order to print out information. So I'm just gonna drop it from there because there's just no point as far as

the rest of this goes. However, I will say we have an article on our site about how inkjet printers work, so if you're just curious about the technology and and I want to learn more about it, We've got some animations and some illustrations there that really go into how these nozzles spray out these tiny drops of ink. There's there's two basic versions that we talk about in the article. The thermal bubble version, where you have a a UH.

You have a use resistors that generate heat to expand a piece within the nozzle that pushes the ink out, and then as the resistor drops in temperature UH, the material contracts, which pulls more ink into the nozzle and it does this very very rapidly, and that's what forces the inc out of the nozzle in these tiny, tiny, tiny drops. Then there's, of course, the the other version is the piezo electric uh ink jet printer that we talked about in that pod, not not the podcast, in

that article. And the piece of electric If you don't know what piece of electric means, that essentially means that if you have it's certain materials that if you run a current of electricity through them, it changes the shape of the material, and vice versa. If you were to change the shape of the material, you would generate an electric current. UM. So the quartz crystal in a in

a watch is an example of a piece of electric material. UM. And in this case, you're talking about running a little current through and the piece of electric material changes shape and that's what pushes the ink through the nozzle and pulls more ink from the reservoir from the cartridge into the nozzle area. Uh. But there's more discussion about that in the article. I just figured that we should probably move into kind of transition into the way that that

HP leverage this technology for the medical field. Yeah. Yeah. One thing that we didn't quite touch on unless I was sleeping through that, which is possible, yeah, UM, was that the in in the inkjet process. Now you were talking about the piece of electric crystals UM and the piezo and the sorry in the inkjet process. UM. You know, each each of those nozzles has the ability to squirt droplets of ink and one of the cool things about that is as a droplet leaves, it creates a tiny

amount of suction which pulls more ink to the print head. UM. So you know, this technology is what enabled HP to do this is you know, the ability to have the droplets pull one another and that helps feed inc through or whatever it is that you're using in the printer UH to be able to pull more of the material out. UM. Of course, we talked about HP UH, you know, some time ago in the podcast UH, and we talked about how one of the first things they were involved with

was medical technology. A long time before the desktop computer came out, they were involved with this. So it's certainly very natural that HP would be interested in UH combining it's it's medical technologies and its computer technologies. And I think they really came up with a novel idea. Yeah.

And in this case, you might be wondering, Okay, so why would you want to to print chemicals to create uh, to create pharmaceutical drugs And the answer to that is all about how pharmaceutical drugs are developed in the lab. It's a very methodical scientific process and it has to be otherwise disaster can strike. So when you're developing a drug, there are a lot of different things you have to consider.

For one thing, you have to consider the efficacy of the drug itself, right, does it do what you need it to do? Does it actually uh, you know, what is the medicinal effect real, So there's that. That's an important part one, probably the most important part. But then you also have to figure out the balance of the ingredients that make up that drug, because at certain levels

it might be toxic. So you have to do a whole toxicology reports on whatever your drugs are, like what what dosage is the right amount for the average human being? And and the whole process can take depending on how many chemicals are going into this drug to create the

molecules that make up the foundation of this drug. Uh, you might have very different effects just by saying, well, if we put more of ingredient A and then ingredient B, here's the medicological effect the pharmacological effect, you know, And if we put more B and than A, the pharmacological effect maybe entirely different and determining the right balance is a challenge, right, and it's a it's a painstaking process

that that can take a lot of time. Um. Of course, if you're going by the scientific method, and for those of us have studied that in school, you know, it's it's pretty basic to us, but it wasn't you know, many centuries ago. Um. You know, you have to you have to make one subtle adjustment to the process at every increment, so that you know that that one thing is the only thing that you have changed. Yeah, exactly.

You have to mark it down and say, okay, well I've I've tried A with B. A with B doesn't work, uh so, and now I will try A with C. You know, And you have to make those subtle changes and and and it can take a lot of time to go through those things. Um. But HPS process of of going through this process has speed things, speeded things up significantly, I would think because um, one of the things they do in chemistry of all kinds, not just

for a pharmacy is is titration. Um. And that's basically making these subtle delutions to see um, you know, okay, so we've checked to see if a solution of this chemical will work. Um, now let's try the solution. Now let's try the percent solution and oh gee whiz, that's gonna take forever, right, you wanna you want to keep? Really, what you're looking for is you're trying to find the lowest amount of the active ingredient that will still bring about the effects you want in order to minimize any

potential side effects you might have from a medication. What you you don't think gastro intestinal distress is a positive side effect. I rarely do. It can be a comedic one. I'll be right back as a matter of but at any rate, Yeah, this is this is a very painstaking process. Like Chris was saying, you have to be able to determine, all right, well, this is the specific level that we need to hit. This is this is how much of this drug versus this drug we need to hit in

order to make this medication work. And uh, in general, in the lab, this can take a very long time. If you're doing this by hand, it takes forever time. I had to do this in chemistry. I had to do titrations in chemistry. And you know, you remember you're counting each drop and you're measuring very carefully. And when you're talking about measuring drops with titration that's not terribly precise.

You're talking about drops that are that are pretty large, I mean especially compared to what these printers can do so well. In high school chemistry, what they were trying to teach us is the basics they want to teach you, uh you know, how how the scientific method works, how uh chemistry works, if you will, and uh you know they're not we weren't trying to come up with a

new uh a new remedy for a disease. Right, So the HP printers that can do this that they're digital dispensers actually that's what they're called, but it's using that ink jet technology. What you're what you can do with these things is you can you get this little it's almost like a it's like a cartridge in a way. But what you can do is you can put a

certain whatever chemicals you're working in. You you put a tiny little drop into one little reservoir for this ink jet printer essentially, and then you can put a second one in another compartment, and then you can program it the printer to mix those in different proportions with one another, so that you suddenly come up with all these different, very precise mixtures of your various chemical compounds, so that you can determine which one is the best for whatever

rug you are developing at the time. And it does it very very quickly, so within half a minute, it can give you a full scale of titrations across a fairly broad spectrum. And it's doing it at a very precise method. When it was first announced back in inn they were talking about a precision of around twenty Peco leaders. Now, Pico is smaller than Nano, okay, so a Nano leader would be one billionth of a leader. A Peka leader

is one trillionth of a leader. So when it was announced it was at a precision of twenty Peko leaders. Now it is According to HPS website on the subject, they've gotten it down to about thirteen Peka leaders, So it's even more precise now and it can do a titration of between thirteen Peako leaders up to ten micro leaders, and a micro leader is one millionth of a leader.

Just think if we were trying to advance burrito technology, how much more precise we could get if we were going with more guio than just a pico to guyo. That was a long way for that. I was just waiting and waiting and like anyway, so yeah, the that hurt that one of the Uh, this doesn't really look I would advise you, if you're really interested in this, to take a look at this. They do have videos of this process going on. It doesn't look like what

we think of as a desktop ink jet printer. UM. It's it's these trays that it uses are are actually UM disposable to very important because you don't want any residue, no no UM. And it's it's kind of cool because it's a very small tray and they dropped the tray into the printer and then they can add the chemicals that they're using for the study, whichever study they're working

on UM as they go. So uh, it's it's really kind of cool because they're not using the same print head that they would if they were, say printing out their dissertations from their studies on paper. And it's to watch because it's you know, you can see it spray onto the paper using these trays, right, and it can

also print into little like UM grids. Of containers. So in other words, you're you're printing out the big compound that you've created into little containers so that then you can test each container and see what what affects that particular mixture will have and whether or not you know one is better than another, and which one you should

really focus on. This really streamlines the development of of pharmaceuticals, and you know we're talking pharmaceuticals of course, is a multibillion dollar industry, and in theory, by streamlining the process, you could bring the costs of developing drugs down that again, in theory could eventually pass on uh down the line so that those individual drugs are not as expensive as earlier drugs that took longer to develop. Right now, of course,

that's all based upon the cost of production. It's not necessarily based upon the actual corporate behavior of a pharmaceutical company, which I cannot really talk about because it doesn't have anything to do with technology. Well, that has to do with economy. As a yeah, as as a corporate body that has responsibilities to shareholders, its point is to maximize

profits while doing its business. But theoretically this this should also help them too, because they could probably deliver medicines more effectively and cheaply, and still increase its bottom line in the process. UM also would speed up development of

new medications UM. But there are also other benefits. People have talked about the possibility that uh, you know, we we've talked about subdermal uh we haven't on this podcast, but you know, people in general have been discussing how the medical medical patches work, UM, the drug delivery patches that you put on your skin for different kinds of medications. UM. There there have been discussions that HP could use this technology to uh spray the medicine on a patch, and

it could be something customized. For say, if Jonathan needs a specific formulation of a medication that would be different from the dosage that I would get, they would spray it onto, you know, the patches for him and give him those, and they could use the same dispenser to spray the ones that they would give to me for a different formulation of the medication, be a different concentration

of the various ingredients. You're talking about personalized medicine at that point, because when you think about it, are our basic medications that we go out and we take, you know, whether they're tablets or capsules or whatever. They are based upon an average physiology for uh, you know, just the average patient, for example, and that we don't necessarily fit

that average. We may our physiologies are different, metabolisms are different, The other medications we're taking might have interactions with this medication, so you know, one person might not need as much as the other, or it might interfere so they cannot give that person as much, right so, you know, and when you go to the doctor and you get a prescription, you might have to get a different concentration of that

drug than someone else would have. Or it might be something even more primitive, where it's just take half a tablet in the morning and a half tablet at night, as opposed to a full tablet, whereas Chris might have to take a full tablet each time. That's you know, these are not very precise, whereas in this case, you're talking about tailoring medication to specific individuals so that you're getting the the most benefit from that medication with the

fewest side effects. That's the real goal here, and and it's not the only way that this could potentially come about. There's another kind of technology again, it's an ink jet technology, but it's um it's a different methodology that is being explored by a company called Glaxo Smith Kleine, very large pharmaceutical company, and what they're looking at is the possibility

of printing medication directly onto tablets. So the tablets themselves are really the they're the paper in the in the printer analogy, right, that's the tablets themselves have no medicinal quality to them. They are just what the medicine is printed on top of. So basically, if you took the tablets without any medicine sprayed onto them, they would effectively be a placebo. Yes, it would be almost you know, essentially the same thing as a sugar mill and a

plus sebo. Placebos are great, man. I remember when I had a headache and I took three plus sebos. I almost odeed on placebo. Hey, it's Jonathan from two thousand nineteen, butting in here just go. Wanted to let you know we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more printing medication. A placebo is something that has no active ingredients in it. It's often used and if you if you're not unfamiliar with the term.

It's often used in uh in in scientific tests in order to determine whether or not a quote unquote real drug is effective. So you you would take a a selection of people who all are are needing medication for some particular ailment. And it could be anything. It could be a physical ailment, could be emotional, mental, whatever. So you you've got this group of people and you divide them up into different groups. Your place cico group is

your control group. These are people who are taking something that has no active ingredients in it, and they you know, they should not know that that it should be a blind test. In fact, if it's a really good test, it's double blind, meaning that the people who are administering the test also do not know if the drug that they are administering is in fact the real drug or the placebo version, because that way they can't give any

information to the test group and influence their response. So you give the placebo to one control group, you give the drug to the test group, and then you do and then you compare the results. Now, this is a really complicated issue no matter what kind of test you're doing when you're talking about human beings, because uh you know, we're all different. Yeah, So even if the drug is completely effective, because we're humans, uh, the results may not

immediately tell you how effective that drug is. And that's so it's a it's a long process with lots and lots of testing before a drug can be said to be effective. And if you measure it against the performance of the placebo group. Let's say that the control group all says, oh, I felt so much better at taking that medication. It was amazing, and the test group says the same thing. Well, now you don't know, because the placebo it was just as effective as the drug, which

may mean that the drug has no medicinal effect. It may mean that the medicinal effect is negligible, or it may just mean that people's are silly. But anyway, that's the whole testing procedure. So with this this other printing medication on tablets process, you would get to a point where you could again very precisely control exactly what kind and how much and how concentrated the medicine is when you print it on the tablet. So in theory you

could again personalize medical treatment. Although if you're talking about a mass production model, you're really not talking about personalization. You're just talking about a different way of producing medicine. Uh.

There's some problems that they're facing with this. One of those being that currently, at least as of the recording of this podcast and the most recent research material I could get hold of, uh, this is only effective for half a percent of all medications that come in tablet form. So that means that only a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of all the different tablet medicines would benefit from this approach. They're hoping to improve processes and get that number up

to so still fewer than half. Right. Well, and at one time, uh, you know, my grandfather was a pharmacist, so you know, but he was a pharmacist in the early twentieth century. Um, And back then, they they mix things at the pharmacy. Now today you can still find pharmacists who will do this. Uh. They're they typically refer to themselves as compounding pharmacists. So if you see a sign for a compounding pharmacy, basically what they're saying is, uh,

you know, we mix special medications. UM. I've actually had to have uh something mixed up special for me. Um. And it's it's very weird to do this because you know, they get in there with the mortar and pestle and grind stuff up and mix stuff together. But if you go to your you know, the pharmacy in your grocery store or your um, you know, the department store, generally what they do is they order stuff and that can be inconvenient. Now, you know, they say, well, I can't

get that for you today. It's probably gonna be next Tuesday before I can get anything shipped in for us. Now, this this kind of technology, if it's on a patch or you can print it onto a tablet, might mean that they could get uh, you know, the chemicals in and they can say, well, I can I can mix up that concentration for you later this afternoon. You might get your medication a lot more quickly. They might be

able to get more of the raw materials in. Now I don't know, uh, you know, if it's only effective for a certain amount of the um the population, and it may not be as effective, but it might help. On the other hand, that also might mean that they have a lot of ross off laying around that could be mixed to make other stuff. And as we know, pharmacies or targets for people who like to break in, to steal stuff, to make things that may or may not be legal, right, like illicit drugs. This is really

what we're talking about. Um. But see there there again, there are benefits that this this technology could bring in also detriments. It's like any kind of technology really, but um, the benefits are are enticing, yeah, you know, and not not only are you talking about not only are you talking about personalized medication, uh, and also a streamlined manufacturing process.

You're also talking about the potential of this medication taking effect much more quickly than it would in a traditional format. So if you talk about the tablet, where the medication is essentially baked into the tablet, you know, the digestive system takes a while to break that tablet down, and the medication gets into your your blood system, your circulatory system and is absorbed and however whatever the the the the mechanical process is for that particular medication, because they

are different. Um, if you're printing it on the outside of the tablet, then that's going to get absorbed much faster than it would if it were part of the tablet. So that's that's one potential benefit is that the the pharmacological effects would would kick in earlier than they would

with other types of tablets. Oh sorry, go ahead. I was gonna say then that that's sort of if you you are thinking of uh, the ink jet printer in this case, printing on a row of tablets as though they were the paper in a desktop ink jet printer. But there's another way you could think about that, if you were thinking about something like three D printing, then the medicine could be all mixed together and printed out in the form of a tablet. Yeah. In fact, we'll

we'll talk about that in just a second. Uh. The one other thing I wanted to say about this tablet approach is that potentially you could even get to a point where you could print multiple drugs on a single tablet, which would mean that another benefit for the patient and is that if they are on something like three or four medications, instead of having to take three or four tablets, they might only have to take one that has all

of the different medications printed on it. And now again, because we're talking about of all tablets right now, even at that there the goal being, um, that's you know, the odds that every medication a person might need, someone who has a lot of different prescriptions. Uh. The odds that they would be able to get all of those into one pill are not great, but it's a potential

future for this technology. Sure. Yeah, they could print your your antihistamine and your allergy medication and your multi vitamin altogether in one tablet that's prescribed. Do you buy your doctor and just give you all of it in one one go. Yeah. Now you wanted to talk a little bit about printing out skin. Oh, yeah, that's true. Um, I had forgotten about that. I completely blew the segway there. Yeah,

this is something that It was funny because I was looking. Uh. Jonathan and I have both heard about the potential for for uh using these printers last year, and so I was looking for that and in the process I found an article from actually quite a few years ago, from two thousand four, UM in I d G News, UH from Susannah Patten, and what they were talking about was the possibility of using printers to print out skin, artificial skin for grafting purposes. UM. This would be really cool

because um, not all skin graphs take now. And they tried to get it from the from the patient who has been uh generally this is for burn victims. I actually knew a kid when I was growing up who suffered second and third degree burns along his legs and had to have an extensive skin graft and it was Yeah, they had to take it from further up his leg in order to to transplant it down on his leg, and it was a a very long and painful says

for him. Yeah, I just I can't imagine. Um. But the problem, the problem is not all of that works as successfully as they would like it too, because you know, they have to cover the area or they're going to try to cover the area, and there may not be suitable skin on the patient available to do the graft. Uh, it can be you know, they're taking it from one place and moving it to another, so they're you know, they're creating more injury if you will, in the process

of crafts don't always take and sometimes they shrink. And also there's a huge risk of infection. Yes, yes there are. Um. They actually we're doing this at the University of South Carolina and uh they're using gel, a form of gel instead of paper. UM, so they are actually repurposing. Now this isn't using a new technology. This was actually repurposing older printers with larger holes for nozzles. UM. So they

this was you know, when the parimental process. But what they were doing was using this gel and and uh you know, printing them the material that could be used for graphs. And the benefit here um was that it could be you know, more suitable for printing to that specific area, and it was less likely to shrink because they were using this this artificial material, so it was

really a better quality of material than the person's actual skin. Now, I didn't find a lot of information about whether or not this has been used currently, but this was done in two thousand four, and it's a very interesting thought. UM. They were also talking about the possibility of printing complete organs, which is also a three This would also be a three D process. UM. That's pretty amazing to think about, UM.

And it's it's the kind of thing that obviously hasn't been used a lot as of right now, but you know, going forward now that three D printing is becoming very much a reality in the rapid prototyping. Well, we discuss this in a previous podcast to UM. You know, this is this is very much a fairly common thing now you can buy your own three D printer. Now they're not cheap, and I'm not going to print out a human heart for you. But no, But but the idea

is that you could use gels. I also found, just as a quick mention, um, scientists who are working on printing on gels for electrical connectivity. Uh, not not for for medicine, but for the purposes of electronics. So as the the work into printing on gels continues, in the work of printing for medicine continues, you can expect that, um, you know, these things are very much a possibility, and you know may move very quickly in the years to come. Chris and I have a little bit more to say

about printing medication right after this break. It's a very exciting thing to me because I love the idea of being able to print organs where you no longer have to worry upon worry about getting the right donor or if it's an organ that can be replaced with a mechanical version, and then of course you have to worry about other elements like your body rejecting it or whatever.

When you when you're talking about printing your own organs, you can think about a time in the future where we might be able to say this organ was printed specifically from this person's based on this person's DNA and their physiology, so that the likelihood of the body accepting the new organ is much higher than it would be if it were a traditional transplant, and so the survivability goes up. You don't have to worry about organ donors

as much. You you reduce the need for people to sit on a waiting list for a transplant it for indeterminate amounts of time. And you know, that's a very that's an incredibly emotionally taxing situation to be in, you know, where you don't know if you're going to ever get the organ you need. You know, it's a race against time, and there are people ahead of you. It's that's a tough situation. So the benefits of this technology are enormous. It's really hard. I mean, I could not exaggerate how

important it would be. Um. But getting back into also three D printing and and closer to stuff that's happening on happening right now. You you alluded to it in the early, way too early, the attempted segue, Uh yeah, using three D printing to create drugs like like a like a capsule or a tablet. There's a professor actually the chair of chemistry at Glasgow University named Lee Cronin who was he had a TED talk about this. He's actually he's known for some pretty uh innovative ideas in

various spaces. He's also a fellow who has really kind of he's got He's got a lot of goals this guy. One of them is to eventually create a create a life form like that was Another one of his projects is not just creating um this three D printing drug thing. He also did TED talk about using a process to actually create a new form, a synthetic form of life.

So he's got a lot of a lot of synthetic fingers and synthetic pies out there, but he was talking about using three D printers to create to create UH drugs. And one of the ways he would the way they're talking about doing this is building first using a polymer called that they're calling reaction where, which would create essentially

the reaction chamber for a chemical process. Right, because drugs are are in general they are the uh the result of some sort of chemical reaction between various ingredients interacting together, well, you can control somewhat the Really, you can completely control the concentration and effect of those drugs by not just the amount of the active ingredients that you introduce, or the or the various ingredients that you introduce the don't

necessarily have to be active. Uh, not just controlling how much of each of those individual ingredients come in, but the size and shape of the reaction chamber, because that can control the speed of the chemical process, which can again affect what the outcome of that process will ultimately be. A fast process might result in a different type of drug than the slow process, even if you're using the

same ingredients. So he came up with this idea, or he and his team came up with this idea of using the polymer to to print out very very precise reaction chambers, and then using the same printer laying down layers of the various compounds that you would use for a drug, and the heavier compounds would be on top, the lighter compounds on the bottom, and essentially the heavier compounds would start to sink down into the lighter compounds

and a very controlled chemical reaction would take place. Ultimately, he hopes to be able to lace this reaction where polymer with various catalysts, and a catalyst of course, is something that that facilitates a chemical reaction, right, So in other words, you would have an entire pharmacological lab reduced down to a tiny, tiny form factor because you're using a three D printer. That would be very cool. It

would be really cool. And then his ultimate goal would be that people patients would be able to purchase a printer and take it home and connected to their computer or and then they would buy essentially buy a drug recipe from whatever pharmacy or you know, whatever, whatever the the the vendor would be. But they would buy the drug recipe online which would then download to their computer.

They would send you know, they would have to have the the basic ingredients whatever those basic ingredients are for that drug. But they would then send a print job essentially to their printer and it would then print that medication out for them. So he actually compares his project to iTunes and the iPod. He says, you know, it's it's all it's an app. It's not the content, it's just the way of generating whatever it is. You know, it's it's your way to access content that's provided by

other people. It's like a smartphone app in the sense that this is just the program that lets you do the stuff. The actual content is going to come from whatever the vendor is. So if you need to buy pain killer, you could purchase the pain killer recipe, send it to your printer and print it out. Now, this is not that different from the other three D printer conversation we've had. In the previous podcast, we talked about, you know, people designing stuff. Like, let's say that someone

designs a particularly nice table. The table just looks really cool, and then yeah, and then you can download, you know, purchase and download the schematic for that table, send it to a three D printer, and have it print out the various pieces you need to assemble that table. This is the same idea, except you're taking it to medicine as opposed to furniture or a toy or even a prototype whatever else you know, you would use a three D printer to create. So it's but it's the same

basic approach. He's just like, why can't we apply this approach to medicine. If it works in this case, could it not work in this So that's what he and his team are working on now. They they're still, you know, in the very early days of testing as far as this is concerned, but it's a very promising and interesting approach. Now. People have already raised some concerns about the ultimate goal about being able to buy a printer. You know, these

prinners cost a couple of thousand dollars. But when you when you when you compare that to the price of buying medication over time, that is not a big deal. Assuming that the raw materials are not as expensive as the medication would be, then you would be saving money in the long run, assuming you live long enough for

that to benefit you. Right, So, if we live in a world where you can go out and buy a three D printer that can print medication, in a world where you could buy a three D wright, one of the concerns is, well, let's say that this is not a pervasive technology. Let's say that it only goes out to a small percentage of the people in the world who can get hold of this, either because it's got

a barrier economically, or perhaps it's a legal thing. You know, maybe it's legal in some areas but not in others at any rate. Let's assume that only uh, we'll say one percent, one percent of the world's population has access to this technology. For the purposes of this discussion, that one percent ends up going out and buying this printer, taking at home, and now they've got a drug printing machine. What stops that one percent from becoming drug dealers? Alright?

That's that's the problem that people are saying. They're saying, well, if this is not a technology that everyone has access to, you have essentially made a whole bunch of people their own drug companies where they can they they will go out, they'll buy the recipe for whatever drug it is that they want to print, print out a whole bunch of them, and then essentially sell that drug in a black market.

That a new black market would be generated because you would bypass the pharmaceutical companies and the pharmacies and the doctors and you would just have regular individuals kind of prescribing medication out to whoever wants it. So there are some concerns about that now. Uh. Corona and for his part, pretty much dismisses that. He says, you know, this is that you're worrying about something that's not even an issue yet,

and when we get there, it won't be an issue. Um, but that's still you know, the critics have still been a little concerned with what could potentially happen. Well, in three D printing, they've already been people upset that you can print a thing because you know, they've made things that weren't that weren't you know, a book or a piece of music or a film, and they said, oh, you know, we don't have to worry about people copying

our stuff. Well it's now there. I have read reports of people who make things three D things, and you know they're going, wait, they're making our things, right, So now we have to deal with this copyright thing because you could just make our stuff at home. You know, we saw the we saw the music world deal with this first, and then film and television, and then books, so books and publishing. So we've seen major industries already have to deal with this. It just means that everything

is going to have to deal with this. Yeah, you know, that's that's the crazy thing is that. And what will be funny is that I'm sure we're going to see the same sort of uh ham fisted mistakes being made by each industry. Like it's just like, seriously, people, did you not learn anything from the previous incarnations of this problem. Well, there these are industries that haven't necessarily typically had to

deal with them. Some of them had to it. They're there are people who thought they were out of trouble and people who thought they were immune to it. That is another podcast. However, I did want to mention to h really quickly because we're kind of going along. But um, there are also three D printers being used in other types of medicine. Two. UM. I have seen uh three D printing being used to create custom uh dental materials, um, you know, for people who need uh implants or or

you know those kinds of things. Um. And I know that they're using three D printing to create other types of implants, uh, you know obviously the harder physical material bone things like replacing knee joints or hip joints, jawbones.

That's just amazing. Yeah, the idea of just printing out on you whatever it is, which is great because again you can print it at such precision that you can meet the needs of the patient much more readily than you could if you're talking about you know, a one size fits all approach, because we're not all one size

as it turns out. Yeah, well, it's fascinating to think that you might be able to do X rays and cat scans and and things that that imaging that you would uh not have been able to use just a generation to go to get such precision precise measurements, put that information into a computer and print out what you need rather than having to you know, make a cast or you know whatever to to create a new one or go, h you know what you look like you might have a medium size hip. Let's throw that in there,

all right. Then that rep up another classic episode of tech Stuff. Hope you guys enjoyed it. If you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech stuff, not future classic episodes that would be weird that you can let me know, send me an email the addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on social media. You can find all the links to that on our website that's text stuff podcast dot com.

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