About Haihe Laboratory of Modern Chinese Medicine

Haihe Laboratory of Modern Chinese Medicine

The Haihe Laboratory of Modern Chinese Medicine is a municipal research laboratory of Tianjin, in northern China, devoted to the scientific modernisation of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). It is located at 10 Poyanghu Road, in the Tuanbo New Town West area of Jinghai District, on the campus of Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Formally established on 30 October 2021, it was the first of Tianjin's Haihe Laboratories to be unveiled, and its inauguration was reported as the moment the whole Haihe Laboratory programme entered what Tianjin's science authorities called its substantive construction stage.

Part of the Haihe Laboratory system

The Haihe Laboratories are Tianjin's flagship provincial-level laboratory system, created by the Tianjin municipal government as a major strategic measure to build the city into a source of independent and original innovation for the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region. The system was benchmarked against national laboratories. Its first wave comprised five laboratories in five directions: materials green creation and manufacturing, advanced computing and key software, synthetic biology, modern Chinese medicine, and cell ecology. A sixth laboratory, for brain–computer interaction, followed in 2023. Tianjin reporting at the launch period described five academicians serving as laboratory directors, more than 30 academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering associated with the programme, nearly 100 national-level high-level talents joining project teams, and close to 3,000 professional and technical staff gathering across the system. The modern Chinese medicine laboratory was the first of them to be formally inaugurated.

Founding and inauguration

The laboratory was officially inaugurated on 30 October 2021 at Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Reporting of the ceremony described the ambition in explicit terms: the laboratory was to be built into a national-level highland for TCM science and technology innovation, and into a source of original innovation for the field in Tianjin and a leading source for the development of the TCM industry. Its formal establishment date, 30 October 2021, and its status as the first Haihe Laboratory to be unveiled are consistently recorded in the laboratory's reference entries and in Tianjin municipal science reporting, which distinguishes it from sister laboratories unveiled later in November 2021.

Leadership: Zhang Boli

The laboratory's first director is Zhang Boli, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Zhang, born in Tianjin in 1948, is one of China's best-known TCM physicians and researchers. He is honorary president of Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine and of the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, and director of the State Key Laboratory of Component-based Chinese Medicine. He has long worked on the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases and on the modernisation of traditional Chinese medicine, and he presided over the formulation of China's undergraduate education standards for TCM. His public profile rose further during public-health emergencies: he worked during the 2003 SARS outbreak and, in 2020, went to Wuhan as a member of the central epidemic prevention and control expert group during the COVID-19 pandemic, leading a national TCM medical team into a fangcang hospital. In September 2020 he received the national honorary title of People's Hero. That combination — clinical standing, a national key laboratory in component-based Chinese medicine, and leadership of the university on whose campus the Haihe laboratory sits — made him the natural founding director.

Research direction one: modern TCM research and development models

The laboratory's documented research programme is organised around four connected areas. The first concerns models and key technologies for the research and development of modern TCM. The underlying problem is well documented in Zhang Boli's own public statements: traditional formulas contain many components, and explaining how they work requires identifying active ingredients and their interactions. The campus research base he describes includes a store of more than 60,000 samples of TCM extract components, described in National People's Congress reporting as the world's largest such bank. Work associated with the State Key Laboratory of Component-based Chinese Medicine and this laboratory has produced dedicated equipment, including high-throughput preparation equipment for components, referred to as Haihe No. 1, and multi-dimensional high-throughput screening equipment for active components, referred to as Haihe No. 2, cited in a People's Political Consultative Conference Daily interview with Zhang about the technological upgrading of TCM.

Research direction two: formulation key technologies

The second area is the key technology of TCM formulations — how multi-component medicines are composed, standardised and made reproducible. This is the bridge between classical prescriptions and modern pharmaceutical practice. Zhang's teams have pursued the standardisation of TCM and the use of big data and advanced manufacturing to make TCM more effective and to clarify how it acts in the body, themes he has set out repeatedly as a deputy to the National People's Congress. Formulation work in this setting is therefore not simply about preserving traditional recipes; it is about expressing them in measurable, testable and manufacturable form.

Research direction three: advanced manufacturing and translation

The third area covers complete-set technologies for advanced TCM manufacturing and their translation into production. Zhang has described his team as a front-runner in digitalising TCM production, with several intelligent TCM production lines developed that changed established industry practice. A school on the Tianjin campus focused on TCM pharmaceutical engineering has, by his account, trained thousands of TCM engineers. For the Haihe laboratory, manufacturing is therefore a research subject in its own right: a modernised medicine that cannot be produced consistently at industrial quality cannot be translated, and the laboratory's mandate explicitly joins advanced manufacturing technology to translation.

Research direction four: clinical evaluation and evidence

The fourth area is TCM clinical evaluation and the translation of evidence. Modernisation claims stand or fall on clinical evidence, and the laboratory's programme includes evaluating TCM interventions clinically and converting that evidence into guidance that regulators, clinicians and industry can use. This completes the laboratory's chain: from components and formulations, through manufacturing, to evaluated clinical use. Zhang's wider record illustrates the outward end of that chain — he has described collaborating with pharmaceutical companies and registering TCM products as prescription drugs, healthcare products or food additives in 16 countries and regions, including the United States, the European Union, Canada and Australia.

Organisation and teams

The laboratory is organised around some 15 principal-investigator (PI) teams, according to its reference documentation. That structure is characteristic of the Haihe model: a municipal laboratory built as a public research platform, relying on a host university — here Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine — and gathering established teams rather than building a wholly new institution from nothing. The campus setting in Jinghai District places the laboratory alongside the university's teaching hospitals, its component-medicine state key laboratory and its component bank, giving its PI teams direct access to the material base their screening and formulation work requires.

Tianjin and Jinghai context

Tianjin is one of China's four direct-controlled municipalities and, with Beijing and Hebei, part of the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei coordinated development region. Tianjin science reporting emphasises the city's concentration of national innovation platforms, including new-generation supercomputing, the national synthetic biology technology innovation centre and a key laboratory of Chinese medicine research. Jinghai District, in the city's south-west, hosts the Tuanbo New Town area where the university campus and the laboratory stand. For a TCM laboratory, the location matters: Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine is one of China's established TCM universities, and the laboratory anchors the modern-Chinese-medicine direction of the municipal laboratory system in the institution with the deepest local TCM research base.

Significance

The Haihe Laboratory of Modern Chinese Medicine matters for three documented reasons. First, it was the pathfinder of the Haihe system — the first laboratory unveiled, in October 2021, marking the programme's move from approval to construction. Second, it concentrates, under a single academician-led platform, the four problems that define TCM modernisation as its own researchers state them: how new TCM medicines are researched, how formulations are standardised, how they are manufactured intelligently, and how their clinical value is evaluated and evidenced. Third, it ties that scientific programme to an existing industrial and educational base — intelligent production lines, a pharmaceutical-engineering school and international product registrations described by its director — so that its stated purpose, to serve as a source of original innovation and of industrial development for modern Chinese medicine, rests on institutions that already exist around it in Tianjin.