By Futurist Thomas Frey
In Nanjing, China, a factory is rising—not built from conveyor belts, tanks, and mixing vats, but from rows and rows of printers. A new pharmaceutical facility is poised to produce up to 300 million tablets per year, using additive manufacturing techniques to craft each pill layer by layer. This is no laboratory experiment—it’s being billed as the world’s largest 3D-printed drug factory.
Triastek, the company behind this facility, is cutting out many of the steps traditional pharma companies cling to: no mixers, no complex coating lines, no separate granulation or compression machines. Instead, they rely on a digitized, traceable, printer-based process that leverages hundreds of thousands of monitoring points to “draw” internal structures, dissolution pathways, and timed-release mechanisms.
Continue reading… “The Factory of the Future: China’s 3D-Printed Drugs Signal a New Pharma Era”