“There has got to be a better way”: A compounding veteran on 3D printing and the future of personalized medicine
Few people have watched compounding change as closely as Dr. Bob Shrewsbury. He has taught compounding to pharmacy students for decades, and he has seen the profession from both sides of the counter, in hospital and in retail pharmacy. When we visited him at the school of pharmacy, we asked a simple question: how should compounding evolve, and where does 3D printing fit in?
His answer starts with the patients. He has seen people wait hours for their medication while a single pharmacist works through the queue. “You’re just sitting there and thinking, there has got to be a better way,” he says. As diagnostics and genetics push medicine toward treatment built around the individual, he believes now is the right moment for compounding to change. 3D printing, he argues, gives patients personalized doses without the cost and time that industrial manufacturing adds to an already overworked healthcare system.
Then he pointed to the analysis results from his own students’ compounds on the wall behind him, and he named the real issue: consistency. “Even good compounders have a 2, 3, 4% variation in things that they make over and over again. And that variation disappears with the 3D printer.”
His conclusion: better control, lower costs, and time saved. “It just seems like the right thing to do.”
Watch the full conversation below.
About Dr. Robert Shrewsbury
Dr. Robert “Bob” Shrewsbury is an associate professor at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He has taught there for about 40 years and leads the school’s compounding courses, so he has trained generations of pharmacists at the compounding bench. He wrote the textbook Applied Pharmaceutics in Contemporary Compounding and has published compounding books since 1999. Since 2010, he has served on the USP Compounding Expert Committee, which writes the US standards for compounding. During that time, the committee revised USP <795> and <797> and developed <800>, the chapters that set the rules for how compounding pharmacies prepare medications and handle hazardous drugs.