How Craft Health is Driving Healthcare Innvovation Using 3D Printing

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

My name is Wei Jiang, and I am a pharmacist by training, having practiced at a local hospital before going back to the National University of Singapore (NUS) for my postgraduate studies. I received a scholarship from NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering (NGS) to pursue a concurrent double degree in Ph.D. (Formulation Work & Drug Delivery) and an MBA from NUS business school, with a finance specialization.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

Our startup is Craft Health Pte Ltd. We are a healthcare company building the platform to lead the world’s transition towards 3D printed personalized healthcare.

What is the origin story?

Since our undergraduate days, I knew my fellow co-founder, Dr. Seng Han LIM, and we met again while pursuing our post-graduate studies. We wanted to do more translational work and decided to pursue entrepreneurship. In our penultimate year of graduate studies, we thought we should work together to solve the problem of complex medication regimens.

Having practiced for several years at a local hospital, we saw many patients going home with bags of medicines and often complicated medication regimes. These include medicines for diabetes, hypertension, or high cholesterol. To further complicate the already complex dosing, some medicines are taken at different times of the day or required to be taken before or after meals.

We brainstormed and explored many possible solutions, before narrowing it down to 3D printing, where Seng Han had spent his Ph.D. working on. Craft Health was then incorporated.

Basically, we drive innovation using 3D printing as the technology enabler across age-old polypharmacy issues or too many medicines. We have developed our GMP-ready 3D printer (CraftMake™) for pharmaceuticals that do not use heat or UV curing, and a range of 3D printable formulations as the ink (CraftBlends™) that is able to control how fast/slow or when the active ingredient is released. The result is that we can 3D print multiple active ingredients or medicines into several layers of the same polypill, each with its own distinct profile. This means we can have a blood pressure medicine for sustained release (over 4 to 6 hours), a before food/after food combination (delayed-release), and a pain killer for immediate release (released within 15 minutes), all in the same 3D printed polypill.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

Our team is highly complementary. Seng Han has been 3D printing for almost a decade now, and both of us have previous experience in formulation work and practiced as pharmacists previously. Combined, we have experience and expertise in 3D printing, formulation work, pharmacy practice, and business development. This allows us to operate at the intersection of 3D printing and pharmaceuticals.

This means that we are always innovating on what else our 3D printing platform can do. For instance, we have used our knowledge of 3D printing and materials to develop a second product under Craft Health: the Super Long Release (SLR) technology. Basically, this is a 3D printed capsule that is able to float in the gastric environment for 7 days, releasing the drug over a week, and eventually breaking apart and being removed by the body’s natural physiological processes from day 8. Effectively we can convert once daily dosing to once weekly. The product is currently undergoing laboratory testing.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

While doing my Ph.D. & MBA, my original goal was to join a fund targeting healthcare.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

Technology adoption. So far, we have had several supplement companies approach us for manufacturing 3D printed supplements, hospitals for polypills (combining multiple medicines into a single pill), and discussions about potentially out-licensing our technology to a pharmaceutical company.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

Working with the hospitals for adoption. I think this would mean we have come one full circle. We were inspired by the issue of polypharmacy in the hospital, and if we could eventually get 3D printing of medicines done in the hospitals it would be great.

What technologies are you currently most excited about and most worried about? And why?

3D printing in the pharmaceutical space. We have seen 3D printing gained tremendous traction in areas such as aerospace parts, construction of whole buildings, and medical devices. We believe that 3D printing of pharmaceuticals is currently the frontier technology approaching mainstream adoption. We are able to use 3D printing to further value add to the patient, personalizing attributes such as dose, number of medicines, release profiles, and even color & shapes. However, we still need to educate the market on the various use cases as well as the regulatory concerns.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

The broad range of articles and the very frank approach to the topics discussed.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Don’t hesitate to do a start-up. You will learn more in a year than any degree course.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

It is also good to look into other fields for inspiration in your own field, especially when you hit a roadblock. For instance, we have borrowed concepts in the semiconductor industry and applied them to our 3D printing production line.