Challenges in the Quality Control of Botanical Medicine – a Singapore Perspective and Global Trend

The global market for botanical medicine is estimated to be more than US $60 billion and is projected to increase to US $400 billion by 2010. With the increasing usage, quality control of botanicals is important to safe guard consumers' interest. In this talk, an overview of issues concerning quality control [1] of botanicals will be presented. In particular, efforts on the screening for adulterants will be shared from the Singapore perspective. The occurrences of toxic heavy metals and undeclared western drug adulterants in Chinese Proprietary Medicine (CPM) will be presented. In addition, some botanical and herbal preparations sold as sexual performance enhancers have been adulterated with phosphodiesterase-5 (PDE-5) inhibitors and their analogues [2–3] in recent years. The safety and efficacy of such analogues are largely unknown. The global trend and challenges faced will be discussed. Acknowledgements: The financial support of an academic research fund and research scholarships are acknowledged. References: [1] Koh HL, Woo SO (2000) Drug Safety 23(5): 351–362. [2] Zou P, et al. (2006)J Chromatogr A 1104(1–2): 113–22. [3] Zou P, et al. (2008)J Pharm Biomed Anal, in press.