Abstract
A new medical system of separation of dispensary from medical practice was started in 2000 in Korea. To expand bioequivalence-proven drug products and to ensure the credibility of the therapeutic equivalence of generic drug are hot issues in Korea. The KFDA also has a plan to revise the pharmaceutical affairs law that bioequivalence reports of all the generic prescription drugs should be submitted to the KFDA in the application for drug approval. Therefore, it becomes more necessary to develop bioequivalence-demonstrating methods for specific preparations such as topical drug products. There are some differences between US and Japanese guidances of bioequivalence studies of generic drug products for topical use. In this paper, we examined the recently published Japanese guideline, Guideline for Bioequivalence Studies of Generic Products For Topical Uses, and Q&A of the guideline, which will be references to make a guidance on bioequivalence studies of topical drug products in Korea.