Category: Validation

How Much Forced Degradation in a Stress Study?

Question: When I forcibly degrade my drug or drug product to create degradation products, how much degradation should I aim for? Answer: The aim of a forced degradation study is to generate degradation products from a drug which are both realistic and representative, typically for the purposes of assessing degradation pathways, or to create suitable […]

What is Mass Balance in a Forced Degradation Study?

Question: What is the ‘mass balance’ for an analytical method and is it critical that I investigate it as part of method development or method validation? Answer: When used in the context of an analytical method, the term ‘mass balance’ relates to its ability to analyse the degradation products of a drug molecule. A method […]

Why are ‘Bio’ Test Methods so Tricky to Validate?

When it comes to validation, analytical test methods used for medicinal products based on biological molecules can be a bit ‘tricky’ to deal with. Coming up with a suitable design for the validation protocol can be quite difficult. In particular, the choice of what parameters to investigate, and the design of the associated experiments. One […]

Where do the Acceptance Criteria in Method Validation Come From?

Webinar Recording One of the most difficult tasks when writing an analytical method validation protocol is to set suitable acceptance criteria, particularly for the characteristics of accuracy and precision. It sometimes seems that the values are just plucked out of the air! Available guidance documents, such as ICH Q2(R1), don’t mention any numbers. In this […]