How to distinguish medicine genuine or sham？Raman spectrometer！

In recent years, our country's economic and health service industry rapidly developing. Traditional Chinese medicine has become increasingly prominent in my country's medical and health system. Especially this year, to overcome COVID-19, Chinese medicine has played an important role in all aspects and the whole process. As for the foundation in the Chinese medicine industry, Qualified and effective Chinese herbal medicine can guarantee resident’s healthy life. Therefore, Chinese herbal medicine’s security issues are received great attention.



Raman spectroscopy technology is a non-contact, non-destructive rapid detection technology, which can easily give fingerprint information such as the structure and composition of the substances. Besides, it also can identify various substances and crystal structures at the molecular level, which is very suitable for the pharmaceutical process and the detection of incoming medicinal materials. Although Infrared absorption spectroscopy is widely applied to the pharmaceutical industry, it still has certain limitations. Compared with the infrared absorption spectrum, It is obvious that the Raman spectrum has the following technical advantages.

• The higher spectral resolution can provide more detail of the spectrum to make information more abundant.
• Raman is simple to test and needn’t sample preparation.
• Have better confocal microscopy performance, spatial resolution achieve a sub-micron level, can give the fine chemical composition distribution image of the sample.
• Can analysis in situ on line
• Can a combination of multivariate correction and regression analysis directly, so that perform the quantitative analysis.

The above characteristics determine that the Raman spectrum has huge application potential in all aspects of pharmaceuticals. Such as reaction, crystallization, dispensing, drying, mixing, etc.; crystal form identification; characterization of active ingredients and excipients, and so on. The following raw material testing is one of the typical applications of optosky’s Raman spectrometer in medicine.

With the Panax notoginseng Chinese medicine market booming, inferior quality and adulteration have become increasingly prominent. To solute these problems, Roman spectrum technology is one of the effective methods.

The authentic Panax notoginseng’s chemical composition is complex, mainly including polysaccharides, flavonoids, and pigrixidin bases. Among them, each chemical composition corresponds to a unique Raman spectrum, and each spectrum has its own characteristic peak.

• The principle process of identifying Chinese herbal medicines by Ramad spectrum:

Firstly, use the optosky’s high sensitivity and high-resolution Raman spectrometer to measure the Raman spectrum of the sample to be tested. After that, make the spectral preprocessing. Then, base on the spectrum peak recognition algorithm to calculate the position of the characteristic peak of the Raman spectrum. Finally, compare with the Chinese Medicine Raman Spectroscopy Database, can realize the non-destructive identification and classification of Chinese herbal medicines.


Under the excitation conditions of the 785nm excitation light wavelength of the micro-resonance Raman spectrometer, the Panax notoginseng sample obtained a Raman spectrum with many characteristic peaks. Compare the position of the characteristic peak with the data in table 1, can determine the Panax notoginseng’s characteristic peaks which is coincide with characteristic peak positions of different chemical components in table 1 basically. Furthermore, the pros and cons of the experimental sample Panax notoginseng and its quality can be identified.

"Chinese Pharmacopoeia" as for the authoritative Code for the Inspection of Drugs by China's Production, Supply, Use and Administration, has already added the guiding principles of Ramad spectrum technology in 2000. In the future, more and more research units and enterprises are bound to pay attention to the application of Raman in pharmaceuticals and drug testing. We will also continue to expand Raman's characterization methods in this field, and provide information on Raman's quantitative research on pharmaceutical ingredients, phase state determination, drug crystallization process research, real-time monitoring of the production process, and pharmacological research, and so on.