'Printed' drugs could herald better medicines

New medicines could also arrive on the market faster by "printing" active pharmaceutical ingredients onto the surface of tablets.

The technique developed by drug giant GlaxoSmithKline can only be applied to around one in 200 medicines used in tablet form. But scientists from Leeds and Durham universities hope to increase this to 40 per cent.

Researchers, led by the Leeds University's faculty of engineering, hope to refine the procedure to enable the correct dose to be printed out safely and create faster-acting drugs as pills will no longer need to be broken down by the digestive system before entering the bloodstream.