China3D printingNet October 27th, a team of teams used a commercial Craftbot 3 FDM 3D printer to create a TPU-based medical device filled with gelled antibiotics, once in place, it can be released to help relieve female itching. After verifying the biocompatibility of the “ring”, the team stated that it can now make it easier and faster for patients to obtain treatments for vaginal infections, thereby “improving” compliance with treatment.
The researchers’ 3D printed ring is designed to improve the efficacy of the treatment of vaginal infections. Picture from Anete Lusina, Pexels.
BV treatment ineffective
Although oral and topical vaginal infection treatments are now easily available in pharmacies around the world, bacterial vaginosis (BV) is still a common disease. This is partly due to the limited efficacy of existing therapies. Despite the fact that many patients use clindamycin or metronidazole to treat such infections, an average of 30% of patients will experience recurrence of symptoms within 4 weeks.
Although the mortality rate of BV is not high, it often brings lasting discomfort to patients. In extreme cases, it can even affect their quality of life. Therefore, for at least half of the world’s population, there is still great hope to find a more effective treatment for vaginal infections, and a large number of previous studies in this field have focused on the drug “chloramphenicol”.
As we all know, chloramphenicol is widely used as an antibiotic to fight BV-inducing bacteria, but it also has serious potential side effects, such as neurotoxicity and bone marrow suppression. In order to solve these very sinister complications, researchers have previously looked for ways to apply drugs locally instead of oral drugs, but using 3D printing to inject them into devices has always proven difficult.
A 3D printed vaginal drug ring by a Hungarian researcher. The picture comes from the Journal of Pharmacy.
An anti-infective vagina “ring”
In order to deliver chloramphenicol more effectively than existing medical suppositories, the Hungarian team drew inspiration from vaginal rings available since the 1970s and designed a device with a similar appearance, not as a contraceptive, but for the following situations To optimize drug distribution.
In fact, engineers have been able to achieve this goal by 3D printing their ring as a “carrier system” and then manually filling antibiotics instead of trying to inject drugs into processable filaments. In doing so, they managed to overcome the thermal variability that hindered the development of previous devices and developed a container that can be filled with different drugs to meet the needs of patients.
To evaluate the efficacy of their new vaginal therapy, the engineers chose to expose their three prototype 3D printed rings to E. coli and Candida albicans, because the pathogen is usually identified as a common cause of BV. Interestingly, each test sample was found to be able to fight bacteria in just 24 hours, but the addition of chitosan to the ring of antibiotics accelerated the rate at which this happened.
In the biocompatibility test, the engineers’ equipment was inoculated with bovine cervical cells and cultured for up to 12 days, and they also demonstrated their potential for human end use. According to the ISO 10993 standard, these cells continue to maintain more than 70% viability, so the researchers concluded that their “vaginal ring samples can be considered cell compatible.”
Although no comfort issues during ring installation were obvious in the team’s research, they insisted that their method allows the ring to be “printed without heat damage or loss of antibiotics” and takes into account the cell compatibility of the device They suggest that their treatment is worthy of “further investigation”.
The team’s 3D printed vaginal ring showed continuous biocompatibility within 12 days. The picture comes from the Journal of Pharmacy.
Advantages of AM administration
Creating a vaginal treatment itself may be a rather unusual application for FDM 3D printing, but the flexibility and precision of the technology does make it ideal for the production of drugs with controlled dosing rates. In a case last year, a team of British and American scientists developed a magnetic field-triggered 3D printing device, which proved to be capable of delivering drugs in personalized doses.
Similar to the Hungarian team, researchers from Zhejiang University and De Montfort University also 3D printed an anti-E. coli device. Scientists call it a multi-layer drug delivery device (DDD). Their system is more targeted at probiotics than feminine hygiene applications, but still retains the ability to deliver multiple drugs to different areas of the stomach at once.
At the same time, researchers at the University of Kent and the University of Strathclyde took this approach to a whole new level by 3D printing microneedles and integrating them into a controllable transdermal drug delivery system. In doing so, the team found that they were able to adjust their equipment to meet the needs of individual patients and condense it into a painless needle phobia patch.
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