Chinese Materia Medica Chemistry Section
About the Section
The Department of Health (DH) started up the Hong Kong Chinese Materia Medica Standards (HKCMMS) Project in 2002 to develop standards for commonly used Chinese Materia Medica (CMM) in phases to ensure the safe use and the quality of CMM on sale in Hong Kong. Since its inception, GL has assisted in the development of HKCMMS through the provision of analytical support to DH to develop protocols for commonly used safety tests, conduct inter-laboratory comparison studies on chemical methods developed by the research institutions, as well as trial run studies on the developed HKCMMS. To reaffirm the government's commitment to the establishment of standards for CMM, the Section was established in May 2015 to provide sustainable and steady technical support to DH for carrying out the important inter-laboratory verification and trial-run studies as well as other scientific support to DH for the sustainability of the project.
Chinese medicine samples
Responsibilities
The key responsibilities are:
- To verify analytical methods developed by the participating research institutes for the Chinese Materia Medica (CMM);
- To conduct the subsequent trial run studies;
- To provide scientific support to DH for the sustainability of the HKCMMS project such as performing reviews and revisions of the commonly used safety methods and monographs so developed.
Key Instruments
The following instruments are used routinely by the Section:
- Gas Chromatographs with Mass Selective Detector, Tandem Mass Spectrometer, Flame Ionisation Detector and Electron Capture Detector
- Ultra High Performance / High Performance Liquid Chromatographs with Photodiode Array Detector, Evaporative Light Scattering Detector and Fluorescence Detector
- Ultra High Performance Liquid Chromatograph — Tandem Mass Spectrometer
- Automatic Thin Layer Chromatography System
- Automatic Solid Phase Extraction Clean-up System
Ultra High Performance Liquid Chromatograph — Tandem Mass Spectrometer