Identification and quality assessment of Houttuynia cordata injection using GC–MS fingerprint: A standardization approach

Houttuynia cordata (Saururaceae) injection (HCI) was widely used to treat disease in China. At present, there were about 40 factories producing HCI, but a good quality standard for its quality control was lacking. In this study, an optimized and validated gas chromatography–mass spectrum (GC–MS) method was applied for the fingerprint analysis of 340 batches of HCI from 34 Chinese pharmaceutical factories. The results showed that HCI from the same factory had very similar GC–MS fingerprints, and evident difference existed among different factories. The representative fingerprints from 20 factories whose intra-factory correlation coefficients were over 0.90 and inter-factory correlation coefficients were over 0.75 were used to calculate the mean fingerprint of all samples. Spectral correlative chromatogram (SCC) was adopted to identify common component in different samples. Fifteen main “common components” were obtained. The mean fingerprint containing those 15 components was suggested to be used as characteristic fingerprint for the rapid identification of HCI and evaluation of the consistency of HCI from factory to factory and from batch to batch.