Rising role of 3D-printing in delivery of therapeutics for infectious disease.

Modern drug delivery to tackle infectious disease has drawn close to personalizing medicine for specific patient populations. Challenges include antibiotic-resistant infections, healthcare associated infections, and customizing treatments for local patient populations. Recently, 3D-printing has become a facilitator for the development of personalized pharmaceutic drug delivery systems. With a variety of manufacturing techniques, 3D-printing offers advantages in drug delivery development for controlled, fine-tuned release and platforms for different routes of administration. This review summarizes 3D-printing techniques in pharmaceutics and drug delivery focusing on treating infectious diseases, and discusses the influence of 3D-printing design considerations on drug delivery platforms targeting these diseases. Additionally, applications of 3D-printing in infectious diseases are summarized, with the goal to provide insight into how future delivery innovations may benefit from 3D-printing to address the global challenges in infectious disease. [Display omitted] • Reviews the rising role of 3D-printing to tackle infectious diseases. • Evaluates key design parameters for 3D-printing targeting infectious diseases. • 3D-printing offers cost efficiency, high throughput methods, and customization. • 3D-printing is being employed to develop localized drug delivery systems. • 3D-printing has led to accurate in vitro testing platforms for drug development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]