From Joanna Aniago_Philippine

For this weekly feedback, I will divide my discussion to two parts - first part would be about ShengChang Pharmaceutical Factory and our Nantou trip.

Part I. Sheng Chang Pharmaceutical Factory

I suddenly activated my nerd mode (as usual) the moment we stepped inside the plant. Since my minor manufacturing pharmacy internship was also in a plant with an herbal medicinal processing facility plus everytime we go on a facility tour we usually tour around the entire plant, I noticed some observations but most of them I was not able to ask due to time limitations. Among my observations were:

1. How are they able to avoid cross contamination when they are producing so many chinese medicinal products with only a single fully automated production line? In my country, we put more emphasis on dedicated production lines for a specific medicinal plant product. In my country, only Filipino dietary supplement producers mix multiple plants in one product and we never declare them as drugs not even our regulatory agency recognize these as such hence they are required to put "no approved therapeutic claims" in the product label. They are not required to have full extent of standardizing the quality of each production batch. On the other hand, Filipino medicinal plant facilities operate similarly to a conventional drug facility, they do not mix multiple herbal plants in a single product due to potential herb-herb interactions. If the plant decides to produce multiple herb products, they need to provide sufficient documentation to our regulatory a more exhaustive documentation which is too tedious and expensive for an SME so they would opt for the dietary supplement route to allow their products to enter the market faster.

2. They perform a LOT of ID tests for each medicinal plant, way more than what we do in my country. This is the first time I saw the integration of plant histology as an ID test. Around 15 years ago, they only performed HPTLC as an ID test. The rest is wet digestion method for heavy metal analysis by AAS and crude ash. Also, our guide also mentioned that they have their own animal facility for toxicity testing. From what I know, to date only one manuf in my country has its own animal facility; the rest outsource this by funding universities or government RDI to do it for them. On another note, I was so amazed that they are using ICP in their trace metal analysis and LC/MS/MS for identification of toxic impurities. They had not just one, but TWO sets of ICP (MS and OES) and LC/MS/MS! In my country, from what I know only one university has ICP-MS and my previous employer has ICP-OES while less than 5 had LC/MS/MS. These equipment are indeed very expensive im terms of capital and maintenance which made me really appreciate how much they pay attention to ensuring quality of theit products.

3. They source out a lot of their herbs from different suppliers abroad mainly in China using chemical fingerprints as markers for identification but not sure about standardization of quality attributes regardless of the ontogeny (a.k.a. the environmental conditions where the batch of the plant grew) I tried asking this question but I am not sure if they understood it correctly. What I meant was if manuf plants wanted to ensure the consistency of each plant batch produced by their supplier, they should also control all the conditions used to grow their plant. When I asked them if they do supplier qualification and audit, the tour guide answered "yes". In that aspect, we are the same. I would have loved to learn more about their supplier audit process.

4. They design the facility in such a way it is easy for visitors to see the entire process without the need to enter the line. We rarely have manuf facilities in the Philippines that permit such. The good thing about this is it allows non-pharmacy people to learn and appreciate more about GMP-compliant manufacturing of TCMs.

Part II: Nantou trip

The Lukang old street is not any different from other old streets in Taipei where there is heavy influence of Japanese culture, EXCEPT this is the only street I've been to where we got to eat deer meat! We do not eat deer meat in my country since I am not even sure if we have deer livestock there. It is still a nice experience regardless.

The Sun Moon lake is definitely my fave in this trip as it gives a very relaxing vibe plus its wildlife is so rich (I saw lots of Formosan monkeys near one viewing deck. Laguna de Bay is the largest lake that we have with a distance of 911 km2 compared to Sun Moon lake with a distance of 700+ km2. Other than this, we do not have huge lakes in my country... Lake Lanao and Taal lake which are second and third largest lakes in my country were not even close to this. What I also noticed was they also have a pier and harbor within the lake (we do not have such in our lakes). The pier gave the Bahamas vibes which was relaxing especially at night.

The last one was the theme park in the Aboriginal village. It's like immersing yourself in old Taiwan in a nutshell. In my country, we have at least ten surviving indigenous tribes but when you want to be immersed in their culture you must make an effort to go up the mountain. I have never seen this amount of effort to introduce the aboriginal people to the public by placing everything in one place. Plus, I love the breathtaking view of the lake as seen from the gondolas that we took from one place to another especially in the afternoon. I hope I will be able to go back here to learn more about old Taiwan.