Summary of CMS Seminar Club presentation on Friday, March 31, 2023.
Title: 3D Printing for Pharma and Food applications
Speaker: Dr. Kjeld J.C. van Bommel, Senior Consultant 3D Food & Pharma Printing, TNO – Department Equipment for Additive Manufacturing, Eindhoven, the Netherlands
On Friday, March 31, Dr. van Bommel gave a presentation at Fujita Health University. He showed us how 3D printing can be used for making personalized foods and medicines. Choosing the precise constituents of foods is especially beneficial under physical challenges such as in disease, the military, and professional sports. The 3D printing of medicines allows quantitative adjustments, such as for the age and weight of patients, and the making of tablet structures that optimize the delivery(-time) of the active pharmaceutical ingredients.
Recording: For members of Fujita University, a recording of the meeting (without the discussion part) will be available at our Manabi system. Unfortunately, we cannot open the recording for a wider audience.
There were only 19 participants who enjoyed the meeting, which may have been related to the previous webinar being by Nobel laureate Sir Richard and receiving many visitors and the 3D printing topic not being within our usual spectrum of topics. Professor David Alexander may have summarized a general mood when he wrote me afterward (repeating something he had already said during the seminar):
“When I first looked at the seminar topic, I thought to myself “Ho, hum, maybe I will take a nap”. BUT, as I said [during the seminar], I learned something new with almost every sentence he spoke. It was a fantastic seminar!!”
Other people also told me how much they enjoyed it, and we had a lively discussion at the end of the webinar. To explain the top quality of this presentation: The Netherlands is one of the, if not THE, most professional countries in food production, and TNO—the organization that Dr. van Bommel represents for 3D printing of food and pharma—is the highest practical research organization in the Netherlands. Furthermore, Dr. van Bommel is a naturally gifted speaker with an obvious passion for the topic.
The contents of the presentation
The below summarizes some but not all of the points addressed by Dr. van Bommel.
TNO, the employer of Dr. van Bommel
First, Dr. van Bommel shortly introduced TNO, which is the research organization that he works for. TNO stands for Toegepast Natuurwetenschappelijk Onderzoek, which means “Applied” or “Practical” research in the natural sciences, and it is the biggest innovation organization in the Netherlands with >3400 researchers. It was founded in 1932, partly on advice from the Dutch Nobel Prize winner Hendrik Lorentz, and its function is to support both the government and the industry in the Netherlands with new inventions and practical science. It is a non-profit organization, which gets a lot of money from the government, but it also gets a lot of money from research projects with companies. The model works very well, because it has the thinking power and government support of a university while being much more practical, and TNO is a major contributor to progress in the Netherlands.
The principles of 3D printing
The term “3D printing” refers to the layerwise deposition of materials. That can be in the form of pastes from multiple tubes, as shown schematically in Fig. 1A and shown by a photograph of a simple 3D printer in Fig. 1B. The moving and squeezing of the tubes is steered by a computer program which has a virtual 3D image that it first “cuts” in horizontal slices that then can be recreated on top of each other in the real world.
Obviously, the shapes that can be created with 3D printing depend on the potential of the material to harden, which may be enhanced locally for example by heating through lasers. It is also possible for 3D printers to additionally print a supportive (scaffolding) structure that later, after the completion and hardening of the desired final structure, can be removed.
Principally similar to the above system are techniques in which first a layer of a loose powder is deposited, in which then local dropping of a fluid creates a chemical hardening reaction after which the remaining loose powder can be removed; this is called “powder bed printing.” Rather than by fluid addition, a local hardening reaction in the powder can also be induced through heating by a laser (“selective laser sintering”), and Dr. van Bommel showed us how cookies can be made this way.
Techniques and materials vary between applications, and the best-known uses of 3D printing are for plastic and metal structures. Fig. 2 shows various types of 3D printing in which TNO has been involved. The big advantage of 3D printing is the large variety of shapes and material compositions that can be created, while for bulk production of identical items other production methods are often cheaper.
3D printing of food items
For 3D printing of food, only eatable materials are used, which can vary from homogenized whole foods to more purified substances and minerals.
Logical food materials for 3D printing are those that are already based on dough or paste such as chocolate, pasta, and cooky dough. Dr. van Bommel showed us beautiful shapes that can be created from these materials (e.g., the chocolate structure in the bottom middle picture in Fig. 2) and which are already produced by commercial players. Depending on the technique and desired end-results, further treatments such as the baking of the cookies or boiling of the pasta shapes may still be required before consumption. Fig. 3 shows pasta forms created by 3D printing by the company BluRhapsody with help of TNO.
For commercial players, 3D printing of unique shapes allows them to enter a much higher segment of the same market and increase their profit. For top restaurants, it is nowadays not uncommon to have their own 3D food printer, for example for printing personalized decorative items of sugar for weddings or other special events.
Figure 4 shows how the entrepreneur Melissa Snover, initially helped by TNO, uses 3D food printing to make personalized gum candy (Fig. 4A) as well as “multivitamin” stacks of personally chosen layers with specific vitamins or other healthy foods (Fig. 4B). These “nutrient gummies” are also sold as SKINSTACKS together with the company Neutrogena Skin360, in which people can photograph and answer questions about their skin and then get advice on the health snack that matches (Fig. 5). All these products are very popular.
The 3D printing of foods for personal needs is also used in the program “Imagine” in which the Dutch military and other partners such as hospitals, together with TNO, experiment with using 3D food printing in mobile satellite kitchens (containers). This is all based on the fact that different bodies doing different things have different food requirements, and careful matching may optimize fitness in soldiers and professional athletes, as well as sick and elderly people (Fig. 6).
A very important possibility of 3D food printing is the creation of shapes in soft foods for, mostly elderly, people with dysphagia (difficulty in swallowing) who can otherwise only eat purees. Eating “blobs” of puree for the rest of their lives severely decreases their appetite, which is reversed by the creation of shapes. For example, carrots can be pureed and then printed in carrot form (Fig. 7), which ingredient-wise only requires the extra addition of an eatable gelling agent to enhance form-strength. These 3D-printed foods are often fortified with extra nutrients, carbohydrates, etc., because people with dysphagia tend to eat very little. There is an enormous interest in producing this type of meals by hospitals and elderly homes, and TNO has been involved in the creation of a prototype of an assembly line for printing this type of food (Fig. 8), and these types of foods are currently entering the market.
3D printing of pharmaceuticals (tablets)
The 3D printing of pharmaceuticals mostly concerns tablets, so the shapes are not as spectacular as with foods. However, 3D printing of tablets provides important advantages including:
• The amounts of active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) can be conveniently adjusted per age and size of the patient, and for medication trajectories with gradually increasing or decreasing API. This can, for example, help to counter the frustrating fact that nowadays, at home and in hospitals, in >50% of medication for children some quantitative manipulation (like tablet cutting) is necessary, often under messy and imprecise conditions.
• Different excipients (helper materials) can be chosen, for example, because children do not tolerate some excipients.
• Multiple different APIs can be mixed into “poly-pills.”
• The pills can be produced locally, improving the supply infrastructure.
• The surface-to-volume ratio of the pill can be increased, for example by printing donut shapes.
• By powder bed technology, some highly porous pills can be made, which dissolve in the mouth within one second. This is highly beneficial when people have difficulties swallowing hard objects, for example during an epileptic seizure. For this reason, the American FDA has approved 3D printed tablets for the drug SPRITAM, and many companies are now interested in it.
In summary, 3D printing of tablets allows their personalization and local production. Currently, the major hurdles are regulatory, because drug approval is commonly based on clinical trials in which 3D printing is not used and dosing variation is very limited. However, there is a general trend among regulatory bodies like the FDA to be positive about the type of changes that can be provided by 3D printing, so there is a genuine development in the direction as shown in Fig. 9.
Summary of the seminar
We learned how 3D printing of foods and pharmaceuticals could be very helpful for hospitals like Fujita Health University. Patients can get foods that are adapted to their nutritional needs and, for those that otherwise can only eat formless puree, in more appetizing shapes. Pills can be printed with the exact amounts of API needed in a variety of shapes and structures.
A danger from artificial intelligence?
During the discussion part of the seminar, one of the questions was about Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is believed to have some risk of becoming “independent” and out of human control, but that would mostly be restricted to the virtual world. However, when AI would be connected with the near-endless possibilities of 3D printing, AI would have a way to express itself in the real world. Dr. van Bommel replied that AI indeed has been used to develop 3D-printed shapes that humans cannot think of, but that he does not believe in a danger of AI using 3D printing to take over the world.
