For decades I have advocated and worked towards proper standards for traditional herbal medicines. These efforts and disruptive concepts/technologies are described in my books.
Now, 10 years after our patent application, “System and Method for Assessing Traditional Medicines” was submitted detailing our Phyto-True System, a European patent (EP 2 185 167 B1) was finally granted, published on July 4, 2018, EPO Bulletin 2018/27. The key part of our Phyto-True system patented is the Representative Botanical Reference Materials (RBRM) aka Phyto-True Reference Materials (PTRM). These are the basic herbal standards required for properly investigating traditional medicines, especially Chinese herbs. Without them, traditional medicines cannot be evaluated properly, yielding irreproducible results and hence controversies whenever herbal medicines are studied using misapplied technologies specifically developed for chemical drugs.
I thank my co-inventor Greg Pennyroyal and my former technical team at Phyto-Technologies, Inc. (including Darin Smith, Heather Conway, Shannon Ehlers, David Hansen, and Pat Mettler) for their contribution. This patent is a byproduct resulting from an SBIR grant for feverfew research from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), now renamed National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), with me as Principal Investigator and Dennis Awang, PhD, as Co-Principal Investigator.
I also want to thank my associates, Jan Matyska and Vaclav Tomek of PhytoCZ of the Czech Republic for their faith in our technology and their perseverance in pursuing the patenting of this technology.
RBRM for initially a dozen Chinese herbs are available from: www.chromadex.com
RBRM for more Chinese herbs will also be soon available from: www.ichemtesting.com.