The 2008 Annual Meeting of Chinese Pharmaceutical Association was held recently at Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province. Cheng Yang, a postgraduate student from the Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences (ICMS) of the University of Macau (UM), won the third prize at the meeting for his paper titled “Discrimination of Polysaccharides from Six Traditional Chinese Herbs Using High-Performance Thin-Layer Chromatography”.

Organized by the Chinese Pharmaceutical Association, the meeting is an influential and high-level academic conference in the field of pharmaceutical sciences in China. The conference was participated by more than 1,500 pharmaceutical experts, including a vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, academicians from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, President of the Chinese Pharmaceutical Association Mr. Guowei Sang and its academicians, as well as leaders and experts from the Ministry of Health, the Health Department of the General Logistics Department, the State Food and Drug Administration of the People’s Republic of China, and the Chinese Association for Science and Technology. The conference proceedings collected more than 600 papers, in which about 200 papers were selected to be presented at 16 specialized sessions. At the end, 41 outstanding papers were awarded prizes including 3 first prizes, 13 second prizes and 25 third prizes.

Financially supported by The Science and Technology Development Fund of Macau and the Research Committee of UM, Cheng Yang’s research project “Discrimination of Polysaccharides from Six Traditional Chinese Herbs Using High-Performance Thin-Layer Chromatography” has provided a novel strategy for the quality control of polysaccharides from Chinese herbs. Cheng Yang is supervised by Associate Professor Shaoping Li from ICMS. Master’s candidates he supervised before were also awarded the third prize of excellent paper in the 2006 Annual Meeting of Chinese Pharmaceutical Association.

Caption: The Prize winner Cheng Yang (left), PhD candidate Jia Guan (right) and their supervisor Associate Professor Shaoping Li.