Programming of drug release via rolling‐up of patterned biopolymer films

Abstract Continuous progress of personalized medicine is insistently calling the pharmaceutical sector to increase product variability more than ever before. One of the challenges consists in personalization of the drug release rates and doses from drug‐containing media. Herein is introduced an innovative methodology which resolves this problem by combining inkjet printing and rolling up procedure, allowing for the production of capsules with tailorable distributions of medical compounds. The prototype capsules consist of rolled‐up polymeric films over which fluorescent probes have been deposited via inkjet printing prior to rolling. The position of the probes inside the capsules are determined by the printed 2D pattern. The delay and the rate of the release of the probes in dissolution media can be shaped by the number of rolls and the position of the drug reservoir on the polymeric film before rolling. The innovative method proposed in the paper paves the way to a novel family of drug delivery devices with a broad range of therapeutic applications and it stands alongside other additive manufacturing techniques but allows to avoid their usual constraints.