Assessing distributions of estimated drug shelf lives in stability analysis

Pooling batches in drug stability study by using constant-width simultaneous confidence bands

One important study objective in drug stability studies is to estimate the shelf-life of a drug. A key statistical problem involved in this is how to assess the practical equivalence of different batches of the same drug so that different batches can be subgrouped to produce a single shelf-life for the drug. In this paper constant-width simultaneous confidence bands are proposed to quantify the magnitude of difference between different batches, with a particular view to establish the practical equivalence of different batches. This approach is suitable for the situation that the intercepts and slopes of the regression lines for the batches cannot be assumed to be equal. It is shown how constant-width simultaneous confidence bands can be easily constructed for the multiple comparison of several general linear regression models. In particular, it is shown that constant-width simultaneous confidence bands have a better chance to establish the equivalence than, and so are preferable to, the hyperbola-shaped simultaneous confidence bands considered.

Comparing distributions of shelf lives for drug products with two components under different designs

To reduce the cost of stability testing in drug research and development, both bracketing and matrixing designs are recommended in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) guidelines for drug products with a single active ingredient (component). When the drug product contains multiple active components, the naïve approach is to take the minimum of shelf lives obtained from individual components as the labeled shelf life. The purpose of this article is to compare the distributions of the shelf life obtained as the minimum shelf life of two components for full FDA's sampling plan, matrixing, and bracketing designs. The results were obtained based on theoretical considerations and simulation studies.