 Hasmur, it's great to meet you. What are you doing here in this lab? I use 3D printing to formulate drug alluding medical devices and I specifically look into medical devices for women's health. For example, intrauterine devices, so for contraception, the ones that are loaded with foam ones. So here I have two types of technologies for 3D printing. The first one which has fused that position modelling. So that's where we use a polymer and then we create that object with. So you're 3D printing a contraceptive? Yes, so still in the experimental state. There have been some work published by a number of groups using this technology which is the FDM1. Trying to load it with a number of drugs, foam ones or model drugs. Look into is to compare this one to the other type of technology of 3D printing where we have resin, which is a monomer or the components of the polymer. And then we make a polymer by water curing it, so solidifying it using light. And that way the advantage of that technology over this one is that because it's a liquid, you can easily incorporate the drug the way you want. So you don't have to have a step beforehand to incorporate the drug. Everything is in one step. Now I have to admit I've seen many 3D printers in my lifetime. I've never seen one that 3D prints drugs and I've never seen a 3D printer that doesn't use some sort of powder or resin but instead uses liquid. So the traditional coil uses copper? Correct. And it's the copper that does the work of the contraceptive? Indeed, yes. So you're not printing the copper are you? No, no. So we're working with the polymer. So the other type which is commercially available where they have a hormone incorporated into the device itself and then its releases. The advantage of using 3D printing is that you can customise it. You're not restricted to a certain size and then also we can change the composition. There are ways of how we can incorporate a number of things separately. So you don't have to worry about them interacting while you're making them. Also we're looking into trying to tailor the release so how the drug comes out of the device and see how would that be possible to improve the clinical outcome. But we're still at the stage of the development. It all sounds like bespoke? Indeed because what you want is you want to personalise it meaning that it's for the specific person and you want to customise it so you can have whatever you want for that particular person. It gives us a lot of ways to help customise it. So personalising in the form of drugs that it delivers. Yes. Personalising in the size. Correct. And scale of it. And the design. And design. Yes, whatever you want. The type of material. So you're not restricted to one type of material so you can play around and have different things. Depending on what you want it to be and how long you want it to be. Is it something that's be inserted for example and then removed or something to be biodegradable and then it's inserted and then left for the body to then dispose of. Oh my gosh. So many options and all so smart and all in 50 minutes. Exactly. So it's just a simple technique. It's the way that you use it and the design and the material is where the selection of the material that's where the work goes into and the research goes into. The University of Greenwich is an amazing place for innovation and really driving technology forward. What would you say are the key objectives of your research and what makes your work so novel? The novelty comes in in the application. The University of Greenwich is the best place to do it because you have really, really good facilities as well as you have a number of people with different areas of expertise so I can really discuss, collaborate and learn from other people as well so that's what's best thing about it. Asma I'm so excited to tell you that I think the 3D print is ready. Yes it is. So what happens next? We just need to remove it off the plate. So what you have here is the object and on top of a support and then you can see it that way. So that wouldn't be to scale. Standard plastic, no drugs in this but what is so novel about the research happening at Greenwich is the fact that drugs can be embedded into this and slowly released and as part of your work Asma. Yes to design that in the best possible way. Yes exactly. What's the other kind of prototype you could print? I'm also working on micro needles so I'll show you how to make them. You can make a patch with their tiny needles. Oh wow. They're too small to cause any pain. Oh wow. And so drugs would be embedded. Exactly, exactly. So what I kind of try to show here is with the color. So if you have one with no drugs it's completely plain and then you can incorporate different images as colors for example. So tell me why do you need to 3D print with a liquid? It allows for that ability to customize the concentrations, how much drug you have in and the different properties of different drugs so they can exist in this liquid form and you can just build it in the object. I want to watch it because I have never seen a 3D printer that works with liquid and it's so fascinating because it's a liquid that mixes the drug and the resin. Indeed. How does it make it solid? So the liquid comes from a resin which is a monomer which is the building plot of a polymer. So polymer is repeated connected monomers in a way in a chemical reaction. So what we're doing is basically a port of curing a chemical reaction for these monomers to stick together to make a larger size molecule. And what you mean by photo is you're using light as the bonding agent? Indeed. These are similar to when you go to the nail salon and you want to do your nails and you get the gel type where you have it under the UV light. It's basically the same principle where you're exposing the light is what causes the reaction to happen. What's fascinating about your research is that it's engineering so you have to determine the physicalities of what you're printing and every engineer loves a 3D printer but the minute you incorporate drugs into it everything changes. My area is in broadly called pharmaceuticals and that's where we convert a drug into a medicine. So it's like if it's a tablet that's a medicine or the active ingredient inside maybe paracetamol that's a drug. So we try to find ways of how we design our medicine to be able to achieve what we want it to achieve and there are a number of factors that can affect it. One of it is who is taking the drug, others is how the drug behaves in the body as well as how the drug behaves when we formulate it. And the drug is a prominent factor of those but we think as well of the process and the parameters affecting the process as well. It's almost like a mix between engineering and pharmacy, it's a fascinating area.