PD Dr. Christian Steuer received the DPhG Quality of Medicines Award 2025

At the DPhG Annual Conference in Freiburg, Dr. Christian Steuer received the DPhG Quality of Medicines Award 2025. The Frankfurt Foundation Quality of Medicines (FFQM), as the initiator and sponsor of the prize, congratulates Dr. Steuer and his team on this recognition of their scientific research projects in the standardization and authentication of complex herbal products. The award was given for the publication on the investigation of essential oils “Exploring new dimensions: Single and multi-block analysis of essential oils using DBDI-MS and FT-IR for enhanced authenticity control.” (Analytica Chimica Acta, Raeber J., Steuer C., 2023, 1277, 341657). This publication represents an important and innovative contribution to the product safety of herbal medicines.

The award winner is Senior scientist and Group Leader pharmaceutical analytics at the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences and head of the Pharmaceutical Analysis research group at ETH Zurich.

Natural products such as essential oils are often counterfeited due to their high economic value. Common approaches to authenticity testing of natural products are based on the analysis of a few selected markers. However, this approach is usually not sufficient to fully characterize an essential oil. The research group led by Dr. Steuer has now developed innovative analytical methods for the quality assessment of herbal medicines containing essential oils. In this study, a multiblock chemometric analysis was used to verify the authenticity of essential oils. By combining infrared spectroscopy and mass spectrometry, it was possible to distinguish genuine oils from adulterated or synthetic oils with a high degree of precision.

The Frankfurt Foundation congratulates the award winner and his team on this honor, which recognizes an important contribution to the product safety of herbal medicines.