The statutory regulation of herbal medicines is under review within the United Kingdom (UK) and by 2011 all herbal medicines will require either a Product Licence or a Traditional Herbal Registration. The species Scutellaria baicalensis has been shown to possess anti-inflammatory, anti-viral and anti-tumor properties and is one of the most widely used Chinese herbal extracts in Eastern and Western medicines. The bioactivity of this herbal medicine is due to the radical scavenging activities of the flavone components of which there are more than 60. This research has characterised 5 key flavones in 18 extracts of Scutellaria using a combination of HPLC with DAD and MS detection. Employing an internal standard approach, the validated HPLC method afforded good sensitivity and excellent assay precision. Assays for the ferric reducing antioxidant power (FRAP) and total phenol determinations enabled determination of the antioxidant coefficient (PAC) of each Scutellaria extract. The potential usefulness of employing multivariate statistical analysis using a combination of the key parameters collected namely, FRAP activity, total phenol content, levels of 5 flavone biomarkers and the PAC as a means of quality evaluation of the Scutellaria herbal extracts was investigated. The PAC value was predicted by soft independent modelling of class analogy (SIMCA) as being the most discriminatory parameter and applying this ranking the herbal extracts were grouped into 3 clusters. The second most influential parameter in determining the clustering of the samples was the level of baicalin in each extract. It is proposed that the PAC value alone or in combination with a chromatographic fingerprint of key biomarkers [e.g. baicalin or (baicalin+baicalein)] may be useful indicators to adopt for the quality control of S. baicalensis.
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