Owing to the advancement in pharmaceutical technology, traditional Chinese medicine industry has seen rapid development. Preferring conventional manufacturing mode, pharmaceutical enterprises of traditional Chinese medicine have no effective process detection tools and process control methods. As a result, the quality of the final products mainly depends on testing and the quality is inconsistent in the same batch. Process analytical technology(PAT) for traditional Chinese medicine manufacturing, as one of the key advanced manufacturing techniques, can break through the bottleneck in quality control of medicine manufacturing, thus improving the production efficiency and product quality and reducing the material and energy consumption. It is applicable to the process control and real-time release of advanced manufacturing modes such as intelligent manufacturing and continuous manufacturing. This paper summarized the general idea of PAT for traditional Chinese medicine manufacturing. Through the analysis of the characteristics and status quo of the technology, we summed up the methodology for the continuous application and improvement of PAT during the whole life-cycle of traditional Chinese medicine. The five key procedures(process understanding, process detection, process modeling, process control, and continuous improvement) were summarized, and the application was reviewed. Finally, we proposed suggestions for the technical and regulatory challenges in implementing PAT in traditional Chinese medicine industry. This paper aims to provide a reference for development and application of PAT in advanced manufacturing, intelligent manufacturing, and continuous manufacturing of traditional Chinese medicine industry.
Keywords: advanced technology for traditional medicine manufacturing; process analytical technology; process control; process detection; process modeling; process understanding; traditional Chinese medicine manufacturing.