China plans to use chromatographic fingerprint analysis techniques to improve control of the quality of traditional Chinese medicine, experts said in a world forum held in China.

Xie Peishan, a researcher with the Guangzhou Institute for Drug Control, said that this fingerprint technique could be used to make a comprehensive and quantitative quality assessment of both Chinese traditional medicinal crops and prepared Chinese medicines, and therefore would increase the popularity of traditional Chinese medicines in the global market.

Xie, the inventor of the technique, explained its possibilities at the International Senior Forum of Traditional Chinese Medicines and Botanical Products held in Hangzhou, in east China's Zhejiang Province, by comparing it with the human being's memory capacity.

It is known that people can rely on their memory or on photographs to identify one person from a group without any accurate pre-measure of that person's appearance.

Likewise, Xie said, quality controllers will be able to ascertain the quality and ingredients of a certain batch of traditional Chinese medicines by the comparison of its chromatographic fingerprint with that of the standard specimen of the medicine.

The fingerprint of a medicine matched the integral feature of the medicine's chromatogram which was confirmed by quantitative sampling and quantitative testing.

Currently, China still uses spectrophotometric technology to check the index of a particular effective ingredient or of a certain active component contained in a traditional Chinese medicine to evaluate its quality. This is a long-standing practice already used on synthetic medicines or on western medicines.

According to Xie, traditional Chinese medicines are not like western medicines when it comes to the impact of ingredients on the curative effects.

Most western medicines are unitary chemical compounds with a definite makeup which means their content and purity have a direct bearing on their curative effects and safety.

However, for Chinese medicines, especially those made of two or more ingredients, the curative effects of the medicine can never be attributed to one particular component.

Therefore, the chromatographic fingerprint analysis technique is more scientific and works better because it agrees more with the pharmacological property of traditional Chinese medicines, Xie says.

With constant development of the chromatographic technique and the improved performance of medical apparatus, Xie believes that there is a potential for wide application of this fingerprint technique.

Zheng Xiaoyu, director of China's State Drug Administration ( SDA), highly praised the fingerprint technique at the forum and confirmed the SDA's intention to apply this technique to the quality assessment of prepared Chinese medicines.

(People’s Daily October 24, 2001)