Exploring novel and fast stability or sameness evaluation tool for different categories of injectable formulations

The establishment of drug product stability and sameness is the heart of generic formulation development. For regulatory filing, various instrumental methods are used on a case basis to establish the generic and innovator product sameness in multiple aspects. Here in the present study, we explored the applicability of the Time-correlated single photon counting (TCS-PC) technique as a fast, reliable, and nondestructive method for establishing the sameness of three different categories of injectable formulations, namely, Amphotericin B liposome for injection, enoxaparin injection, and iron sucrose injection. All three category formulations were evaluated in their native and artificially induced post degradation state to identify the discrimination power of the used instrumental techniques. The degradation of materials were confirmed by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Based on the product category, pre and post-degradation samples were evaluated by selective instrumental methods like differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), fluorescence spectroscopy, particle size analysis by dynamic light scattering (DLS), small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), Raman spectroscopy, inductively coupled plasma optical-emission spectrometry (ICP-OES) and circular dichroism study. All pre and post-degradation samples were further analyzed by TCS-PC. We observed that, TCS-PC can identify the differences between the initial and post degradation samples in very less time with promising discrimination power across the different injectable formulation types. Thus TCS-PC can be used as a fast and promising stability or sameness evaluation tool for different injectable drug products.