Researchers at Glasgow University have started looking into 3D printer technology for producing reaction vessels and reactants that can synthesize chemicals in predictable ways. As a result, a 3D printer could be used in a pharmacy (or even in the home) in order to produce pharmaceuticals on the spot from reactants and chemicals allowing for a greater variety of available drugs and leading the way to a print-on-demand pharmacy.

The BBC is running an article on a research paper published in the journal Nature Chemistry that outlines how the process works:

Using a commercially-available 3D printer operated by computer-aided design software, Prof Lee Cronin and his team have built what they call “reactionware”.

These are tiny vessels in which chemical reactions can take place–but the vessels have the chemicals that drive the reactions already built in.

While this is common in large-scale chemical engineering, the development of reactionware makes it possible for the first time for custom vessels to be fabricated on a laboratory scale, Prof Cronin said.

In organic chemistry, reactions are the basic tools used for synthesizing new chemicals from base reactants. The methodology of discovering these reactions not only uses different reactants (i.e. mixing different chemicals together in certain proportions, at certain times, as in a recipe) but also through controlling the components, temperature, pressure, and other factors as they do so.

With the production of “reactionware” that is capable of containing and controlling the reactants it means that otherwise complex chemistry equipment and the attention of chemists can be boiled down into a “3D printable” vessel that would run the reaction for an end user. This essentially black boxes given reactions with basic reactants to produce complex pharmaceuticals.

The ever-growing technology of 3D printers is doing amazing things with how we think about physical objects. As we’ve seen with the MakerBot for physical objects—or in this case the advent of physibles. What we’re seeing here is the possibility of a 3D pharma printer that would take a reservoir of reactants and software and do the businesses set to it. I can almost see containers with all the proper reactants and a firmware chip with software to tell the 3D printer how to produce the reactionware and run the reactions to produce the final products.

Chemistry on tap at the local pharmacy

Professor Cronin added: “3D printers are becoming increasingly common and affordable. It’s entirely possible that, in the future, we could see chemical engineering technology which is prohibitively expensive today filter down to laboratories and small commercial enterprises.

“Even more importantly, we could use 3D printers to revolutionise access to health care in the developing world, allowing diagnosis and treatment to happen in a much more efficient and economical way than is possible now.

“We could even see 3D printers reach into homes and become fabricators of domestic items, including medications. Perhaps with the introduction of carefully-controlled software ‘apps’, similar to the ones available from Apple, we could see consumers have access to a personal drug designer they could use at home to create the medication they need.”

I am intrigued as to how this might make available an array of similar pharmaceuticals to a pharmacy (or at home) with just reactionware and the reactants. However, it would not be possible to do this with reactants that are extremely volatile or toxic—which is the case with a lot of products, byproducts, and reactants in organic chemistry.

It would not be likely that anyone would want to license the production of these sort of pharmaceuticals in a person’s residence, or perhaps even in a drug store. That’s assuming even if the reactants exist in extremely small quantities as one would expect from the difference between industrial grade and individual grade chemical reactions.

This is still a very good sign for print-on-demand chemistry at pharmacies, especially noting that reactions have already been done with this potential product. It could take the weight off certain generic drugs being shipped to various outlets to have them produced on the spot instead of in great bulk in an industrial lab.

It may yet be a long way to go before we see the first of these machines appear in the local Walgreens or CVS—and even longer for one to appear in a residential household—but I will keep looking forward to it.

photo credit: testTubes3 via photopin (license)