Mark Hanley President of the IT Strategies, an inkjet technology research firm, said: "HP is leveraging a nearly 30-year history in inkjet technology development to address non-print markets under its own brand for the first time." He continued: "Inkjet technology brings the same efficiencies to the drug discovery process that it brought to printing, allowing for on-demand, small-volume, high-precision production at costs significantly lower than existing analog processes."

This may lead to a decrease in expensive labware and the biological fluid waste associated with complex, conventional testing methods that can reduce research costs. The OEM also claims that this process improves productivity by eliminating some of the time-consuming steps in the drug discovery process.

HP said in a statement that it is currently working with several leading pharmaceutical companies to incorporate its dispensing technology into their work. HP’s Vice President and General Manager of Speciality Printing Systems Kathy Tobin said: "Current methods for drug dosing rely on costly manual or automated processes, which are time consuming, error prone and wasteful." She added: "Our inkjet ‘scalable printing technology’ can precisely and rapidly dispense droplets that have one-third the width of a human hair, offering pharmaceutical companies the high-performance dispensing