3D printing pills is nothing new, but its future is still wide open

In 2015, the FDA approved Aprecia Pharmaceuticals’s Spritam, the first-ever 3D-printed pill. It was a milestone for drug making, which usually takes place in a manufacturing facility and famously does not involve a printer.

Since then, Oxford Performance Materials’s OsteoFab has also received FDA approval, but as a printed implant device to replace bones. Spritam, which is used to treat seizures, stands alone as the only approved 3D-printed ingestible. The medication is made through a process called binder jetting, which adds layers of powder and liquid binder during the printing process until the drug is finished forming. The tablet dissolves quickly in water during consumption.

In the 10 years since the FDA approval, the company has been focused on using 3D printing to customize more medications for various drugmakers and help meet reshoring demands.

“What we’ve done for the last 10 years or so has been more of a shift back to technology development,” Kyle Smith, Aprecia’s president and COO, told us.

Ten years later…Printing medications goes far beyond just Spritam, Smith said. It also provides an opportunity to customize “unique dosage forms.”

Tinglong Dai, Bernard T. Ferrari professor at the Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School, told Healthcare Brew that 3D printing medications is good for making small batches of customized pills.

“One can think of a child’s exact dose. Or perhaps an orphan drug or a high-dose tablet that dissolves quickly, which is what Aprecia’s Spritam is designed to do,” he said.

For example, if the machine prints each layer at 20 milligrams, then it can easily provide doses of 60, 80, or 100 milligrams based on patient needs. Aprecia spent the last 10 years further developing its 3D printing machines to make specialized drugs from other companies, building the technology up to forge these partnerships, Smith said.

“The applications that we’re focused on are people coming to us, asking us to develop whatever product they have in a unique dosage form,” he said. This “speed of clinical development, speed to market,” for instance, allows a drugmaker to bring a molecule to Aprecia and get it made in a specific way, like a high-dose, rapid-dissolving form.

Beyond customization, the other benefit of 3D printing is that it’s fast, Smith said, something the drug-making process is in desperate need of.

Onshoring. In August 2025, Aprecia received a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency agreement backed by funding from the Department of Health and Human Services. This has created a pathway to use its 3D printer, alongside science and tech company Battelle’s chemical synthesis platform, to make more drugs in the US and avoid future shortages during public health emergencies.

“The government’s objective there is to obviously reduce reliance on external or overseas parties,” he said.

This also aligns with recent tariff threats and the Trump administration pushing pharmaceutical companies to manufacture more drugs on US soil. Companies like Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson have already announced multibillion-dollar investments to achieve those goals.

Smith thinks 3D printing can be another reshoring option.

“Most people are looking to use advanced manufacturing technologies when they come back onshore. They’re not trying to invest billions and billions of dollars to then say, ‘Hey, we’re just going to do it the same way we’ve been doing it for 100 years,’” Smith said. “[Aprecia is] already established in the US.”

But Dai pushed back against this idea, saying the company “is much less compelling for making millions of pills when a commodity shortage hits. The technology is built for flexibility and customization [rather] than volume and scale.”