“A real solution to stock breaks”: 3D printed drugs arrive in French hospitals

What if your drugs no longer arrived in standardized boxes from the other side of the world, but were printed directly to the hospital, just for you? This is exactly what a French start-up offers, with a technology as discreet as promising: A 3D printer of drugs, thought to meet the precise needs of patients, in real time.

Personalized drugs: the solution tested at the Nîmes University Hospital

The gesture is still rare, but it could become commonplace: instead of waiting for a delivery of standardized drugs, some French hospitals could soon … Print them. In 3D. This is the bet made by MB Therapeutics, a young Montpellier company, which develops a technology capable of producing tailor -made tablets, milligram per milligram, in a few minutes.

Tested for several months at the Nîmes CHU, this new generation printer works with cartridges containing active principle and excipients, which is assembled as needed. For health professionals, the interest is immediate: personalization of treatment, adapted forms (especially in pediatrics) and possibility of bypassing shortages, more and more frequent in pharmacies.

More than a gadget, this innovation brings up an ancient practice up to date: masterful preparation, this craft manufacturing of drugs that hospital pharmacists know well, but that they had to abandon in the face of massive industrialization. The difference is that this time, we add the digital precision and the traceability of the 21st century.

Directed by a former Sanofi, a hospital pharmacist, and supported by a fundraising of 2 million euros, MB Therapeutics hopes to market its solution by 2026. And for once, innovation comes from the United States or Asia, but from Montpellier. Local, adaptable, specifies. In short, everything that modern medicine demands … and that industrial pharmacy is struggling to provide.