DISSOLUTION PROFILE SIMILARITY ANALYSES-STATISTICAL PRINCIPLES, METHODS AND CONSIDERATIONS

The pharmaceutical industry and regulatory agencies rely on dissolution similarity testing to make critical product decisions as part of drug product life cycle management. Accordingly, the application of mathematical approaches to evaluate dissolution profile similarity is described in regulatory guidance with the emphasis given to the similarity factor f₂ with little discussion of alternative methods. In an effort to highlight current practices to assess dissolution profile similarity and to strive toward global harmonization, a workshop entitled "In Vitro Dissolution Similarity Assessment in Support of Drug Product Quality: What, How, When" was held on May 21-22, 2019 at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. This manuscript provides in-depth discussion of the mathematical principles of the model-independent statistical methods for dissolution profile similarity analyses presented in the workshop. Deeper understanding of the testing objective and statistical properties of the available statistical methods is essential to identify methods which are appropriate for application in practice. A decision tree is provided to aid in the selection of an appropriate statistical method based on the underlying characteristics of the drug product. Finally, the design of dissolution profile studies is addressed regarding analytical and statistical recommendations to sufficiently power the study. This includes a detailed discussion on evaluation of dissolution profile data for which several batches per reference and/or test product are available.