Dear Colleagues,

Nowadays, 3D-Printing (3DP), also referred as Additive Manufacturing (AM) or Rapid Prototyping (RP), is one of the emerging and fastest developing technologies in pharmaceutical field. 3D-Printing includes a variety of techniques able to precisely produce freeform solid objects of high degrees of complexity, starting from digital models created with computer-aided design (CAD). The 3D-Printing process may produce drug products with a complex design and multi-drug components with great fidelity, reproducibility, and cost-effectiveness.

In the last few years, 3DP is greatly increasing its potential application in pharmaceutics as well as in medicine, and is opening new horizons to targeted and personalized therapies. 3DP gives the possibility to produce small batches of patient-specific drug dosage forms and medical devices with tailored dosages, geometries, shapes, sizes, and drug release properties. The great advantage of 3DP technology is the design and production of dosage forms and devices answering to the need of delivering “the right drug at the right dose and at the right time.” 3DP also offers a forward-looking view of medicines and medical devices produced at the point of dispensing or at the point of use, moving the attention from traditional mass manufacturing to on demand manufacturing in an industry and to personalized drug compounding in a pharmacy; consequently, from centralized towards decentralized manufacturing and more sustainable production.

Despite all these benefits, there are several technical and regulatory challenges that need to be overcome before 3D printing can be completely exploited as medicines’ fabrication technology.

The aim of this Special Issue of Molecules is to go deep into the opportunities and challenges of 3D printing technologies for pharmaceutical and biomedical applications. As Guest Editors, we cordially invite you to submit original research papers or review articles on any aspect related to this new “revolutionizing” approach, including research on principles, requirements for safe and printable materials, bio-materials, polymers and excipients, optimized and standardized printing methods, processing, technologies and the combination of technologies, legal requirements and regulatory considerations.

Prof. Dr. Giulia Auriemma
Prof. Dr. Rita Patrizia Aquino
Prof. Dr. Pasquale Del Gaudio
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Molecules is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• 3D Printing
• Additive Manufacturing
• Rapid prototyping
• Computer-Aided Design
• Pharmaceutics
• Medicine
• Personalized therapy
• Drug Delivery systems
• Medical devices