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FDA Approves First 3D-Printed Drug Tablet

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: August 5th, 2015, 9:00am UTC

An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has for the first time approved a 3D-printed pill for human consumption. The printing technique allows higher and more precise dosages to be layered into a smaller tablet size. This is an early step toward a new method of drug distribution. Right now, pills are made in a factory and shipped to hospitals. With 3D printers, hospitals could simply store a bulk supply of the drug in a pure form, and then print out tablets mdash; containing whatever dosage they desire mdash; as they need them. If patients needs to increase or decrease their dosage, the hospital can do so without changing the appearance of the pills, which could help those with memory impairments.pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=FDA+Approves+First+3D-Printed+Drug+Tablet%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1Dtsmtf"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F15%2F08%2F05%2F0416235%2Ffda-approves-first-3d-printed-drug-tablet%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/08/05/0416235/fda-approves-first-3d-printed-drug-tablet?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/08/05/0416235/fda-approves-first-3d-printed-drug-tablet?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/bTTIvVfBR5M" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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