Planta Med 2013; 79 - OP5
DOI: 10.1055/s-0033-1336419

Are They Really What They're Claimed to be: The Analysis of a Commercial Herbal Supplement Product by UPLC/Qtof MS

K Yu 1, M Margaret Maziarz 1, MD Jones 1, W Potts 1, M Powell 2
  • 1Waters Corporation, 34 Maple Street, Milford, MA 01757
  • 2Quay Pharmaceuticals Ltd., Flintshire, UK

Product adulteration, counterfeit and product consistency are some of the key challenges faced for quality control for herbal supplement product. Here, we use a real life example to demonstrate how to effectively combine versatile analytical tools to solve problems at hand.

Herbal Product B (HPB), a popular herbal supplement in Europe, has received warnings from a few European government agencies with regard to possible drug adulteration. In addition, there are other questions associated with this product such as: are the 13 TCM herbs called for by the recipe truly present in the HPB? Do any other herbs exist in the HPB? Are the products made consistent from batch to batch?

Eight batches of the HPB were analyzed according to a UPLC/Qtof MSE data acquisition protocol along with 24 TCM herbs, among which 13 are the herbs from the recipe, and 11 are the herbs that were suspected to be present in HPB. Five individual synthetic drugs were also analyzed to check the adulteration of HPB. To answer all key the questions for this product, data were processed with different informatics tools (such as exact mass screening tool, quantification tool and PCA) with different application focuses.

Results confirmed that the HPB contained all 5 suspected adulterants at high level. Only two out of the 13 herbs called for by the recipe are present in the product. And the major herbal content in the product is a separate herb that is not one of the 13 herbs. Results from this analysis showed that effective use of a variety of analytical tools is crucial to ensure the quality of the herbal supplement product.