PILLS PRINTED SPECIFICALLY FOR YOU

Originally posted here

Here's a dirty little secret about the little pills you pop: nearly 99.9 percent of the tablet is useless. Only a thousandth of a pill contains the active ingredients that are supposed to make you feel better.

The rest of the pill is just filler so it's large enough for you to pick it up.

If you think that sounds wasteful, you're not alone. Researchers at the University of Leeds, Durham University, and GlaxoSmithKline have teamed up to create pills that are made to order, or perhaps I should "printed to order."

Printing pills means literally printing the active ingredients of a medication onto the side of a tablet. To understand the concept of "printing," think of the active ingredients as tiny droplets that can be printed onto a surface the way ink is printed onto paper, but instead of paper, it's a tablet. That means pills could be individually made for each patient to fit their medical needs and one pill could potentially hold more than one type of medication.

Right now, medications are manufactured by the millions in a one-size-fits-all way. Printing pills would change all that. Instead of the active ingredients being encased somewhere inside the pill, they would be on the side of the pill and in a dosage suitable to the patient's needs.

And since the active ingredients are on the outside of the pill, the active ingredients will act more quickly. That's more accurate than the current system, where a small sample of each batch of pills is checked post-production to make sure the dosage is correct.

Eventually, printing pills will be particularly helpful to anyone who prescribes several medications. If your grandparents (or parents!) are anything like mine, they probably have one of those pill boxes to keep track of which pills they are supposed to take on which days of the week. There are some days when my grandmother has to take almost a dozen pills. Printed pills could put the active ingredients from all of those medications onto just one pill for her to take each day.

This process can now only be applied to less than one percent of all pills on the market. But researchers hope to one day increase the number of printed pills to 40 percent.