With recent development of 3D printing technology, its applications to the bio-industry are increasing. Many research studies are being done for manufacturing personalized tablets through this technology in the pharmaceutical process. In this study, to control the dissolution rate of tablets, a lattice structure was inserted into the tablet and the dissolution rate was compared. The tablet proposed in this study can be manufactured by the FDM method, adopting a lattice structure with a large surface area-to-volume ratio. Tablets containing various lattice structures were fabricated using water-soluble PVA filaments and dissolution experiments were conducted in water at 37oC. As a result, it was confirmed that the specific surface area and the mass loss rate were proportional to both the 3D lattice structure and the monolith structure. Among different structures, the diamond structure had the most active dissolution.

Three-dimensional (3-D) printing, with its capability for producing arbitrary shapes, has shown great potential for usage in patient-specific tissue engineering. However, if artificial tissues are fabricated directly through typical 3-D printing processes, the mechanical properties, particularly for softness or flexibility, significantly differ from those of natural tissues, resulting in inappropriate side effects during surgeries using vascular grafts. However, this can be overcome through the indirect 3-D printing of templates created with a thin-film formation process, such as dip coating. Dip coating is performed in two steps, including dipping/withdrawing a target base template from a polymer solution, and then drying the solvent into a solid thin film on the template. However, it is difficult to form a uniform layer on the arbitrary template because the gravitational flow of the coated solution disturbs the uniformity of the template as the solvent is drying. Therefore, we minimized the flow around the template after dip coating by rapidly removing the solvent removal by dipping the solution-coated template into ethanol. This reduced the solvent removal time and increased the viscosity of the coated solution, thereby alleviating the gravitational flow of the coated solution, and allowing us to successfully fabricate flexible vascular grafts.