The American Herbal Pharmacopeia (AHP) recently published a Cannabis monograph, setting standards for identification, analysis, and quality control. Additionally, the American Herbal Products Association (AHPA) issued basic product safety guidelines for cultivation, manufacturing, dispensing, and laboratory operations for medical Cannabis. The recommendations from the AHP and AHPA are steadily being adopted and are implemented in US states through a 3rd party oversight program called Patient Focused Certification. However, a number of significant hurdles must be overcome to reach higher levels of product safety. Among the issues facing laboratories are access to high purity reference standards, transportation of samples for pesticide or contaminant analysis, having flexibility to efficiently quantify several compounds from a variety of complex matrices in a high throughput manner, dependency on the use of high amounts of toxic solvents, and a shortened life span of expensive analytical equipment used in the routine analysis of viscous and particulate samples. Flash chromatography can help overcome some of the issues facing laboratories engaged in quality control of Cannabis medicines by offering a more efficient way to isolate cannabinoids and other compounds of interest from complex matrices, enhancing potency testing and characterization techniques. Our data was obtained by analyzing complex matrices, i.e., edibles (gummy candy, chocolate, brownies, oil) and topicals (lotion) spiked with known amounts of cannabinoids. We also demonstrate how flash technology can be used to isolate individual canabinoids that can be used as reference standards.

Improving quality control methods for cannabis using flash chromatography

251st National Meeting (2016)

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