Good link. On his podcast, Peter has also talked about generics vs. name brand differences. He had a chemist on who started a pharmacy selling generics where some statistically significant amount of each batch of drugs is tested for chemical verification.
I have not the remotest idea how I would test a cancer drug for myself to see if it was pure. I suppose I could hire a chemical laboratory, if I could figure out what kind of one would do that kind of work...
> I have not the remotest idea how I would test a cancer drug for myself
As someone with only a high school level of chemistry training I would check the melting temperature.
Although seriously get it professionally tested. The delta between USA prices and India/China prices is so high a lab test will barely change the margins.
The first thing to do would be look up the Scientific Discussion or Monograph as filed with the FDA for the brand name product. With the details obtained from there, you'd know what to test for.
The first steps would be assay and impurity tests for the active pharmaceutical ingredients (API). If you bought tablets you'd probably want to do dissolution as well.
If everything looked fine after that, I'd still be concerned about uniformity. If you just performed dissolution on half a dozen tablets, how do you know all the tablets are the same from the whole supply?
Next question is then stability. What happens to the API over an extended time period? Does it deteriorate due to climate or poor storage conditions?
The main issue is quality control. Even an approved generic has to file with the FDA (or equivalent of wherever you are) concerning processes, batch sizes, critical quality attributes etc.