Hyphenated methods – potentials and limitations

Herbal medicine exhibits specific challenges because of its complex multi compound composition and its inherent variance. Due to the progress of modern analytical technologies, more and more in-depth knowledge about the chemical composition of the plant material, the extract and its final dosage form can be obtained. This opens up fascinating opportunities from a scientific perspective but also from an industry point of view. At the same time questions arises how those modern technologies can potentially affect the regulation of future quality control. This topic has to be discussed in a balanced way, the aim should be to use those powerful tools for a better quality control, but with the condition that the technical and regulatory setting still should be realistic and practicable.

In this talk, the term “hyphenated methods” is at one hand used in a classic sense of connecting chromatographic techniques with detectors (LC-UV, LC-MS, GC-MS) and at the other hand in the sense of analyzing the complex data obtained from analytical techniques (MS, NMR, NIR, …) with advanced multivariate methods.