Fabrication of thin films as a drug delivery tool via Laser-Induced Forward Transfer

The use of different 3D printing technologies for pharmaceutical manufacturing provides new opportunities for personalized medicine and on-demand tailored drug products, such as implants and other dosage forms. In this work we present our recent achievements in developing a viable manufacturing process for printed personalized dosage forms of liquid-phase active substances (i.e. paclitaxel) in the nanosecond regime and the optimization of the printing process onto glass slide substrates via the Laser Induced Forward Transfer technique (LIFT). The laser printing conditions for reproducible deposition have been investigated, while the deposited paclitaxel films have been studied by means of Mass Spectrometry (MS)-based analytical technique. In the context of investigating the effectiveness of LIFT printing, the active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) quantification of the LIFT-printed paclitaxel films was confirmed using High-Performance Liquid Chromatography tandem Mass Spectrometry (HPLC-MS/MS) analysis. Initial experiments of APIs laser printing have shown good feasibility of this technique, highlighting LIFT as a promising method for pharmaceutical applications.