“…The concept "It is important to recognize that quality cannot be tested into products; i.e., quality should be built in by design." was stated in the quality by design initiative (ICH, 2009) and widely accepted in the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry (García-Muñoz et al, 2010;Huang et al, 2010;Prpich et al, 2010;Michaels et al, 2011;Yacoub et al, 2011). Despite previous efforts in evaluating the batch-to-batch consistency of TCM after the production process (Fan et al, 2006;Xie et al, 2008;Tistaert et al, 2011;Wang et al, 2011), there is a greater need to improve the quality consistency of TCM during the manufacturing processes (Huang and Qu, 2011).…”