Evaluation Procedure for Quality Consistency of Generic Nifedipine Extended-Release Tablets Based on the Impurity Profile

A procedure to evaluate the quality consistency of generic drugs based on the impurity profile and the similarity analysis methods was presented in this paper. Nifedipine extended-release tablets from six generic factories of China were used to evaluate the uniformity with the original drug in the study. The procedure includes: choice of chromatographic methods, data collection and conformity test, evaluation of intra-batch similarity of drugs, evaluation of generic drugs with the original drug and weighted similarity evaluation of generic drugs. The data were collected via high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), and then calculated by correlation coefficient, cosine, principal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchical clustering analysis (HCA). It is more suitable to use peak areas as the vector when calculating the similarity of impurity profile. After weighting the peak areas of the unspecified impurities in further evaluation of the generic quality, the generic level of different factories was differentiated and the best generic factory was picked out.