Printing of small molecular medicines from the vapor phase.

There is growing need to develop efficient methods for early-stage drug discovery, continuous manufacturing of drug delivery vehicles, and ultra-precise dosing of high potency drugs. Here we demonstrate the use of solvent-free organic vapor jet printing to deposit nanostructured films of small molecular pharmaceutical ingredients, including caffeine, paracetamol, ibuprofen, tamoxifen, BAY 11-7082 and fluorescein, with accuracy on the scale of micrograms per square centimeter, onto glass, Tegaderm, Listerine tabs, and stainless steel microneedles. The printed films exhibit similar crystallographic order and chemistry as the original powders; controlled, order-of-magnitude enhancements of dissolution rate are observed relative to powder-form particles. In vitro treatment of breast and ovarian cancer cell cultures in aqueous media by tamoxifen and BAY 11-7082 films shows similar behavior to drugs pre-dissolved in dimethyl sulfoxide. The demonstrated precise printing of medicines as films, without the use of solvents, can accelerate drug screening and enable continuous manufacturing, while enhancing dosage accuracy.Traditional approaches used in the pharmaceutical industry are not precise or versatile enough for customized medicine formulation and manufacture. Here the authors produce a method to form coatings, with accurate dosages, as well as a means of closely controlling dissolution kinetics.

Thin-film growth and patterning techniques for small molecular organic compounds used in optoelectronic device applications.

Rapid advances in research and development in organic electronics have resulted in many exciting discoveries and applications, including organic light-emitting devices for information display and illumination, solar cells, photodetectors, chemosensors, and logic. Organic optoelectronic materials are broadly classified as polymeric or small molecular. For the latter category, solvent-free deposition techniques are generally preferred to form well-defined interfaces and improve device performance. This article reviews several deposition and patterning methods for small molecular thin films and devices, including organic molecular beam deposition, vacuum thermal evaporation, organic vapor phase deposition, and organic vapor jet printing, and compares them to several other methods that have been proposed recently. We hope this review provides a compact but informative summary of the state of the art in organic device processing and addresses the various techniques' governing physical principles.