Probability lower bounds for USP/NF tests

In the pharmaceutical industry, a number of tests such as content uniformity and dissolution testing are usually performed at various stages of drug manufacturing process to ensure that the drug product meets standards for identity, strength, quality, purity, and stability of the drug product as specified in the United States Pharmacopedia and National Formulary (USP/NF). The USP/NF provides requirements for sampling plans, testing procedures, and acceptance criteria for these tests. To ensure that there is a high probability of passing the USP/NF tests, the sponsors usually establish in-house specification limits based on some lower bounds of the probabilities of passing USP/NF tests for future samples. In this article, we derive some probability lower bounds for USP/NF tests. It is shown that the proposed probability lower bounds are better than the existing ones and are very close to the true probabilities in a broad range of the population mean and variance of the test sample.