Will we one day ‘print’ drugs at home?
Technology is being developed that could one day allow anyone with a 3D printer and an Internet connection to set up a home-based pharmacy. (A 3D printer builds solid objects by depositing repeated layers of a substance in much the same way an ink-jet printer deposits ink on a page. A digital file instructs the printer exactly what to do.)
A team of researchers led by chemist Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, has made a selection of chemicals using a digital blueprint and a 3D printer costing $2,000. The printer essentially builds the necessary lab equipment and then squirts the ingredients into the right places to make the desired compounds.
Though the most immediate application is to existing chemists by providing new ways to discover compounds, it has practical implications for the masses as well.
“It’s a way of democratizing chemistry, bringing chemistry to the masses,” Cronin suggested. For example, people in far-flung regions could make their own headache pills or detergent, he said.
The technique might also allow people to print and share recipes for niche substances that chemical or pharmaceutical companies don’t make because there aren’t enough customers — or because they simply haven’t dreamed up those ideas.
Of course, such freedoms will bring challenges, too, including ensuring that drugs are made safely, and dealing with black markets that might offer prescription-only or illegal drugs.
How does the process work?
With the potential to allow anyone to build almost anything, 3D printing is no stranger to controversy, but how do you make chemistry printable?
Cronin and his colleagues turned to a version of the $2,000 3D printer used in the Fab@Home project, a collaboration aiming to bring self-fabrication into the home.
They discovered that they could use a common bathroom sealant as the primary material for printing chemical reaction chambers of all shapes and sizes, as well as connection tubes of varying lengths. After the material had hardened, the printer’s nozzles squirted in the reactants, or “chemical inks.”
In principle, the dimensions of the equipment and chemical ingredients required to produce a particular product can all be pre-designed and embedded in the same software blueprint. All a user needs to do is download the software and send the commands to a printer.
The researchers envisage an online store where you download an app for a particular drug to your 3D printer and order a standard set of chemical inks.
Potential health dangers from allowing people to print their own legal or illegal drugs would be minimized, Cronin said, as his team would only write software for specific end products that would be difficult to modify into making other reactions. “We would have pre-evaluated the reactions in the lab so no one would be allowed to hack.”
That’s a way off, though. So far, Cronin has printed a simple block containing two chambers connected to a central mixing compartment. That was enough to carry out simple inorganic and organic reactions, and produce totally new compounds. This was done as a proof of principle; the resulting compounds don’t have specific applications.
The researchers also carried out a well-known reaction requiring a catalyst. They printed the catalyst into one of the chamber walls and produced the expected product, showing that this method works.
To provide a heat source, equivalent to a Bunsen burner or hotplate, he suggests printing metallic elements into the flasks at certain spots, which would heat up when placed in a microwave oven.
It should also be possible to print a window into the reaction vessel. That way, the camera on your smartphone and an app could examine the mixture to tell you how a reaction is progressing.
There are bound to be some limits, though. Cronin admits he’s had to deal with a few fires in trying to print reactions that can be explosive in the presence of oxygen. He hopes that by changing the flask material from bathroom sealant to something like Teflon, such air-sensitive reactions will become easier.
A practical example
The team is currently working on a kit to print ibuprofen.
“In countries where there’s little access to even the most basic drugs and cleaning products, most people still have access to mobile phones,” Cronin noted, which would allow them to download the software.
But how will such people get a 3D printer and the chemical ingredients? There are projects to distribute 3D printers in the developing world to enable things like bicycle parts to be made, and Cronin points out that most drugs and detergents are made of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, which are also the components of readily available substances such as corn syrup, glycerol and paraffin.
There is also the possibility that non-chemists in the developed world will use the technology to buy and share recipes directly from chemists, perhaps for substances that a company hasn’t thought up or commercialized.
Chemist Fraser Stoddart, at Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., calls the work “a conceptual breakthrough of refreshing proportions.” Another chemist, Oren Scherman, at the University of Cambridge, is reserving judgment until Cronin proves he can perform otherwise expensive and difficult reactions.
Cronin’s ambition is unabated.
“I imagine years from now, people will make drugs in their 3D printer at home,” he said.
—New Scientist Magazine