Dr. Zheng Li is currently the professor and associate dean of the College of Pharmaceutical Engineering of Traditional Chinese Medicine at Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine. He has received various honors including “Young Qianren Expert of Tianjin” and “First level of 131 innovative talent program of Tianjin”. He has mainly focused on the research of pharmaceutical engineering technology to improve the quality of Chinese medicine. Dr. Li has participated in projects to improve the large variety of Chinese patent drugs including e.g. Shengmai injection and Danhong injection with informatics technologies since 2013.He is currently the principal investigator of projects including “Tianjin Modern Chinese Medicine Industrial Technology Research Institute” and “Demonstration Project of Internet plus Advanced Manufacturing of Chinese Medicine”from Science and Technology Program of Tianjin. Various methods and equipment for process measurement analysis and drug manufacturing have been developed for intelligent and green manufacturing of TCM and demonstration production lines of advanced TCM manufacturing has been built. Dr. Li is also the PI of one project from National Natural Science Foundation of China and participated in various other state level projects. He has published more than 40 papers and submitted more than 20 patents applications with 6 granted.

Key technologies for Digitalization and informatization of the intelligent and green manufacturing of Chinese medicine

It is urgently required to transform and improve the traditional paradigm of TCM manufacturing to improve the quality of TCM. Promoting the integration of information technology and industrialization with application of the technologies of intelligent & green manufacturing of TCM is crucial to realize the objective of “Improving quality, increasing efficiency, saving energy and reducing emissions” for TCM manufacturing industry. I will discuss the key technologies for digital manufacturing of TCM drugs, including two major perspectives of the digitization of TCM products and modeling of TCM manufacturing process. The first important step is to quantitatively define quality target product profile (QTPP) and critical quality attributes (CQA) of TCM and identify the critical process parameters (CPP). The second step is then to develop suitable model for the manufacturing process and establish real time quality monitoring and control strategy to achieve the desired quality profile. I will demonstrate this strategy with examples from real case studies.