Pills from the 3D printer

Pills could soon be produced in shapes that resemble design objects. And this would not be just an aesthetic gimmick, but would serve to release active medical ingredients in the body in a controlled manner. A group of computer scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken and the University of California at Davis have developed a process that uses a combination of computation and 3D printing to produce tablets that dissolve in liquids over a specified period of time. The approach could be of interest to the pharmaceutical industry, which has focused heavily on 3D printing recently.