3D printed mouth guards for oral drug delivery

3D printing is all the rage right now and every week we hear of novel ways that it is being used. Recently we were intrigued to read how researchers are using 3D printing to develop wearable personalized oral delivery devices in the form of mouth guards. We’re pleased that our texture analyzers assisted in helping this research team determine the tensile strength of the filaments that were used in the 3D printing process. Check out the abstract below to learn more.

Abstract: “Despite the burgeoning interest in three-dimensional (3D) printing for the manufacture of customizable oral dosage formulations, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration–approved tablet notwithstanding, the full potential of 3D printing in pharmaceutical sciences has not been realized. In particular, 3D-printed drug-eluting devices offer the possibility for personalization in terms of shape, size, and architecture, but their clinical applications have remained relatively unexplored. We used 3D printing to manufacture a tailored oral drug delivery device with customizable design and tunable release rates in the form of a mouthguard and, subsequently, evaluated the performance of this system in the native setting in a first-in-human study. Our proof-of-concept work demonstrates the immense potential of 3D printing as a platform for the development and translation of next-generation drug delivery devices for personalized therapy.”

Read the full article here: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/5/eaat2544.full

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