Embedding of liquids into water soluble materials via additive manufacturing for timed release

One fundamental goal of personalized medicine is to provide tailored control of the dissolution rate for an oral dosage pill. Additive manufacturing of oral dose medicine allows for customized dissolution by tailoring both geometric and printed material properties. Direct processing of medicine via filament material extrusion is challenging because many active agents become inactive at the elevated temperatures found in the melt-based process. In this work, this limitation is circumvented by incorporating the active agents via in-situ embedding into a priori designed voids. This concept of embedding active ingredients into printed parts is demonstrated by the in-situ deposition of liquid ingredients into thin-walled, water soluble, printed structures. The authors demonstrate the ability to tune dissolution time by varying the thickness of the printed parts walls using this technique.