We are coming to the end of 2020. In 2020, we’ve seen our Party, government, doctors, and scientists use traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) products and medical technology in the treatment of the COVID-19 disease, but in new year of 2021, we face a new variant of the disease that requires a new vigilance, we need good drugs and vaccines to control and therapy of COVID-19.
For Chinese Herbal Medicines (CHM), 2021 is the year we can develop and believe CHM better. We are going on the way to the combination with our loved ones in the CHM by the normal and scientific edition way.
In the first issue of 2021, CHM published and contributed four papers on the study of the CHM’s quality evaluation.
1. Quality is life
By always remembering “Quality is life” of all of brands, we should invent innovated and striking strategies to meet the requirements of any medicinal products. Now, we are qualified to provide higher quality of medicinal products with efficiency and safety. We believe quality is the life of enterprise, the more pursues integrity, pragmatic and efficient operation of this, adhere to the cast quality brand, service in promoting the medical brand. One is primarily around the management of architectural changes across the life cycle, and another of course is managing this issue of quality across the all life cycle in the process of research, development, production and application. Our study is always remembering “Quality is life” in innovated methods, technologies, tools to meet the requirements of clinical higher efficiency and safety.
2. Quality study needs innovation
Quality study is a system engineering, and it needs new science theory, new technology, new methods and tools.
Such as chemometric smart tools are systematically analysis which will bring a profound effect on the ‘material basis and Q-markers’ exploration from TCMs. After data procession, the precise qualitative and quantitative results in chemical fingerprints and metabolic trajectories can ensure the reliability of “material basis and Q-markers” results (Chinese Herbal Medicines, 13(1), 2–16). Usually the data only obtained by chromatography-related technology cannot disclose the material basis or Q-markers in TCMs fully. The integration of multi-dimensional data can be clarified from multiple levels and multiple perspectives. With the development of chemometric tools, the drug properties/efficacy-related components and Q-markers will be more accurately for the internationalization and modernization of TCMs.
Great challenges remain in optimizing the detection of herbal medicines and processing and mining data from the complex information obtained. An integrated strategy toward comprehensive characterization and quantification of multiple components was carried out in Gelsemium elegans (Chinese Herbal Medicines, 13(1), 17–32). This work contributed to the development of a powerful integrated strategy for chemical research based on liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (LC-MS) systems.
Prof. Li’s team explored PAGE and HPTLC methods to evaluate Astragalus Radix from different germplasm resources (Chinese Herbal Medicines, 13(1), 33–42). In the research paper “A mathematical model for quality evaluation of total saponins of Panax japonicas based on hypolipidemic activity” (Chinese Herbal Medicines, 13(1), 43–48), authors performed the preliminarily explore for the establishment of a quality assessment method for total saponins of Panax japonicas associated with the hypolipidemic activity.
All these attempts were with aim to make exploration for the innovation and standardization for TCM industry progress. Quality evaluation of TCM is one of important guarantees for safe drug use in clinical application.
3. Chinese Herbal Medicines contributed innovation development of TCM
We always dedicated our great efforts and financial support to promote the development of journal, with view to providing an international communication platform for the up-to-date research achievements in the field of TCM. CHM have published five research papers on TCM therapy of COVID-19 in special 2020 with lots of attention at home and abroad.
We have successfully applied for China Science and Technology Journals Excellence Action Plan and been newly included in Scopus and DOAJ in 2020.
In the 2021 New Year, CHM’s publishers sincerely thank to the experts of editorial board and all the authors, reviewers and readers for your loving and supporting. Let us work together to promote the innovative development of TCM.