In addition,

financial pressure on healthcare systems has encouraged trends of reducing the number of inpatients through providing efficient outpatient services such as Telehealthcare (McKinstry et al., 2009 and McLean et al., 2013). It is therefore of great interest to provide an efficient and safe patient-tailored, dose-controlling system for outpatients which can be remotely and digitally controlled by a healthcare provider. As oral tablets remain the most popular dosage form for patients, there is an increasing demand for a versatile and highly adjustable production selleck products method of tablets. Traditional methods of tablet manufacture typically require the use of large batches, multiple production steps, designated and expensive facilities and experienced operators. The high cost of this approach combined with its rigid nature rendered it less suitable a means for preparing personalized medicine (Khaled et al., 2014). Ideally, for a production method to address the new challenges of personalized medicine, it should be (i) highly adjustable,

(ii) affordable, (iii) of minimal space requirements, (iv) controllable by network and (v) safe. Several computer-controlled Bioactive Compound Library 3D printing approaches have been developed to produce oral tablets as an alternative to conventional tableting. The design was based on a laying powder bed followed by the deposition of a binder solution from the print-head in a multilayer three dimensional fashion (Katstra et al., 2000, Yu et al., 2009 and Yu

et al., 2007). The proposed technology provided rapid dissolving (Yu et al., 2007), extended release (Yu et al., 2009) and multi-phase delayed release patterns (Rowe et al., 2000). However, the process required a high level of powder flow control, moisture content control, and was limited by the choice of binder. Marked improvement could be achieved when considering the accuracy of dosing, aesthetic quality of the tablet and the thickness of layer deposition (Sandler et al., 2014a). More recently, a bench top 3D printer was Carnitine dehydrogenase utilized to fabricate a bilayer tablet with immediate and extended release pattern (Khaled et al., 2014). However, the slow solidification and shrinking of the gel model affected the shape of the finished tablets. Fused deposition modelling (FDM) is a widely implemented method for 3D printing of solid objects (Lim, 2010). The expiration of patents of this technology is likely to lead to wide utilization of the 3D printing by a large number of consumers at a relatively low cost. The process uses pre-prepared thermoplastic polymeric filament (typically with a diameter of 1.75 mm) as an ‘ink’ and passes it through a high temperature nozzle where it is heated to a semi-liquid state.