Reflection Retrospection Future Expectations
Happy Birthday Sun Ten!
Sun Ten Chairman: Chau-Shin Hsu, Ph.D.
Happy 60th Birthday to the Sun Ten Pharmaceutical Company! First of all, I am so grateful for God’s blessing and leadership as well as all the efforts from Sun Ten’s employees for all these years. We appreciate all our friends and family who nurtured, encouraged, and grew up with Sun Ten.
Just after WWII, my parents, Dr. Hong-Yen Hsu and his wife, Lin-Run, returned to Taiwan from Japan and had the opportunity to bid on an inventory of Codeine Phosphate from the Taiwanese government. After winning the bid, they mixed two types of cough relief product from the Codeine Phosphate. The manufacturing and sale of those two medicinal products was the beginning of the Sun Ten Pharmaceutical Company. After his increased experience with and exposure to Western Medicine, Dr. Hong-Yen Hsu returned to his specialized area of “Natural Product Pharmacology” as he saw more and more negative side-effects in Western Medicine. During the initial stage of his business, Sun Ten received help from Nagakura Seiyaku Osaka, Japan in applying for the Taiwanese government’s “Manufacturing and Sale Permit”, which allowed Sun Ten to launch its first era of business with its “no cooking required and easy-to-take” concentrated herbal extract powders.
It was initially difficult to sell this new form of Chinese herbal preparations and it was not easy to gain acceptance from the general public. It took seven years of hard work to educate physicians and consumers in Taiwan about this new form of “no cooking required and easy-to-take” herbal extract powders. The late 1950s and early 1960s were only the very beginning of the study and evaluation of natural medicinal products; however, Sun Ten sought to use the foremost advanced techniques for quality control. Dr. Hong-Yen Hsu also encouraged all his employees to always remember the company mottos: “Herbal manufacturing is a business on conscientiousness” and “Honest and professional business operations.”
Over time, the analytical techniques for precisely measuring herbal chemical composition improved and Sun Ten began producing chemically consistent extracts from different batches of the same product. During this era, Sun Ten introduced three dimensional High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) and was the first company to use “Radar Graphing” to control the standardization and consistency of herbal extracts. Importantly, Sun Ten always called attention to the safety of its products. For example, Sun Ten pioneered the development and application for improved testing methods for Aristolochic Acids.
In Japan, a sixtieth birthday marks a new beginning, which is why this is a great time for us to launch a new era at Sun Ten which will build upon our previous sixty years of experience and knowledge. Sun Ten will continue to not only guarantee the high quality of our products, but we also want to ensure that our products improve the quality of life for all Sun Ten consumers.
In order to succeed in our next generation approach to standardizing TCM concentrated herbal extracts, we must focus on the evidence-based clinical efficacy of the products. If we are to upgrade TCM pharmaceuticals to Western standards, we must formalize our traditional processes of whole spectrum total extraction so that we can move into partial purification fraction extraction and eventually move to the purification of botanicals. This is the ultimate goal for Sun Ten. We hope the employees of Sun Ten and the people who love and support us will help us to achieve this goal.
