Can We 3D-Print Cannabis?
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×Can We 3D-Print Cannabis?
Technology has come an extended way. We will even print in 3D now! However, we have got to ask: are we able to 3D-print the most controversial plant, the Cannabis?
Like cryptocurrency and GOOP, three-dimensional printing has adherents so passionate about how they approach the fanatic.
However, unlike the cults of digital currency (the value of which is inextricably linked to the for-real money tied to the central banks it has alleged to replace) and bunk wellness cures repackaged and sold with Hollywood star power, there is a minimum of something tangible about 3D printers and therefore the products they create.
Moreover, very much unlike volatile money and curing cancer amorously, 3D-printing technology has rapidly advanced from a fad with questionable utility into a phenomenon with real potential for the remainder of us—but only in specific, select applications.
3D Printing Is Often Considered A Complex Thing
As with the rising tech in most medical firms, the cannabis industry also uses technology with breeds of cannabis from white widow feminized to autoflower genes. They incorporate most of the innovative principles to produce a pharma-grade drug from the plant and move with the 3D-printing terms.
The FDA approved the primary 3D-printed drug in 2015. More recently, researchers at the University of Glasgow's School of Chemistry published a paper during which they explain how "drugs on demand" are often created anywhere within the world, employing a "chemical digital code" and a 3D-printer.
The secret is assigning a digital code to each compound. As long as a 3D printer can receive that code, the printer should be ready to reproduce the compound.
This step towards the "digitization of chemistry" is often wont to produce in-demand vaccines quickly, consistent with articles published in Automation World.
If a printer can replicate pharmaceutical drugs, there is reason to believe 3D printers could also create other substances with pharmacological effects on demand
Hemp Within The 3D Printing Industry
Due to the very fact, the drug remains illegal in many parts of the planet, and it is hardly surprising that Tyson's Ranch Companies' approach may be a novel one for an increasingly crowded herbal highstreet.
As for incorporating Sativa or Indica Strain into additive manufacturing, the main target is on filaments to be used within the 3D printing.
US and Ireland-based filament provider 3D Fuel, as an example, has launched an environmentally-friendly range of hemp filaments. Made out of plastic mixed with recycled coffee, beer waste, and hemp plants, they were produced to be easily printable on any PLA-capable machine using standard PLA settings.
Similarly, 3D4MAKERS released a hemp-based filament that reportedly displayed "excellent adhesion between layers."
North Dakota-based material producer 3Dom, meanwhile, has partnered with bio-composite company c2Renew to make their 'Entwined' filament. Produced using hemp grown in nearby Manitoba, Canada, the printing material is freed from dyes and reportedly has features almost like those of PLA.
Cannabis Too Cool To 3D-Print
It may be cool to 3D-print an office or a house, but it is hard to argue that the appeal advances beyond pure novelty. There has no got to use an enormous and dear printer, explicitly rigged for that purpose, to spit out a polymer house. We have houses, and that we have construction workers who build them. It is an entire industry (for now, at least).
Having a 3D printer available to make pharmaceutical drugs on demand, on the opposite hand, is not only an enormous step towards a reality bent towards Star Trek but might be of immense value to far-flung places in need of hard-to-obtain medical supplies.
So What About 3D-Printed Cannabis?
As Motherboard reported, the Glasgow team's promises of 3D printed drugs anywhere within the world have less to do with 3D printing than the drugs themselves. In their paper, they describe how they were ready to create a relaxant in three steps from "readily available chemical precursors."
Active components of compounds like drugs are "complex molecules." samples of complex molecules include amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins, which are required for animal cells.
If most every drug is often created from just a couple of raw materials with the addition of code, then printing vaccines on demand may be viable.
Bottom Line
It is far more complicated to make a posh molecule sort of a plant cell—and even less assured that a plant cell with many constituent cannabinoids and aromatic oils like terpenes is often created as a 3D-printer.
What would the building blocks be—and how would any of this be more efficient than merely growing a damn plant from seed?
Until those questions are often answered, 3D printing marijuana remains just science fiction but provides it with another generation.
Status | Rejected |