USP Medicines Compendium (MC)

To help ensure that medicines and their ingredients used around the world are of good quality, USP created the USP Medicines Compendium (MC), a free, online collection of voluntary public standards to allow testing of a medicine and its ingredients. The MC was launched on July 1, 2011. View press release.

General Information about MC

The USP Medicines Compendium (MC) includes monographs, general chapters, and reference materials for suitable chemical and biological medicines and their ingredients approved by national regulatory authorities.  The MC does not include standards for foods, traditional medicines/dietary supplements.

The purpose of the MC is to help assure that these medicines are of good quality by providing up-to-date, relevant public standards and reference materials.  MC standards are available to manufacturers, purchasers, national regulatory authorities, and others to assure conformity of a medicine to MC standards through testing.

Standards included in the MC are for legally marketed medicines in various countries. They are intended to support text in other pharmacopeias, and not supplant it. Standards in the MC are authorized by the MC Expert Committees, and are not official. USP does not enforce standards in the MC or any other of its compendia, including USP–NF.

The USP MC, including monographs, General Notices, and applicable general chapters are freely available on the MC website and may be further adopted or adapted without charge by other regulatory or compendial bodies.  A history of prior revisions to USP’s MC monographs is provided on the MC website.