The ICH Q2 guideline requires that an analytical method be validated for commercial
pharmaceutical and bio-pharmaceutical applications. Frequently, validation is done only
once in the method’s lifetime. This is particularly of concern when the future testing is
performed on an instrument with different technical characteristics, in different geographic
locations within the company and/or at contract laboratories around the world, using
different consumables, different analysts, etc. This concern is exacerbated by the
requirement for modern pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical companies to seek
regulatory approval in multiple jurisdictions, where the instrumentation, consumables, and
scientific staff experience at the testing location may be very different than that present in
the place where the drug was developed. These considerations raise questions about the
value of the current format of the validation studies conducted by the industry. Moreover, it
is not clear how the validation data obtained using existing methodologies should or even
could be used toward the assessment of the uncertainty of the future results, given the many
factors that contribute to the uncertainty.