commission

Since more than 50 years the Laboratory of General Biochemistry and Physical Pharmacy plays a major role in the standardization of enzymes used as therapeutic agents. In 1960, during the General Assembly of the FIP (Fédération Internationale Pharmaceutique) at Copenhagen, a scientific symposium on enzymes used in pharmacy was organized. Although pancreatic enzymes, pepsin and papain were already in use as therapeutics before the second world war, the assays to measure the enzymatic activity as described in national Pharmacopoeias were often obsolete or inadequate. To cope with this unsatisfactory situation, the Council of the FIP appealed upon Prof. R. Ruyssen, former director of the Laboratory of General Biochemistry and Physical Pharmacy of Ghent University, to install a  Commission to study these problems and to formulate proposals for better assays for pharmaceutical enzymes. At present the FIP International Commission on Pharmaceutical Enzymes is still directly depending on the Council of the FIP. We are very grateful to Prof. R. Ruyssen, Prof. A. Lauwers and Prof. J. Demeester who served as directors of the Commission in the past decades.

Today our lab still hosts the FIP Centre for Pharmaceutical Enzyme Standards which has a coordination function in organizing collaborative enzyme assays between academic, industrial and national pharmaceutical control laboratories and in distributing FIP enzyme standards all over the world.