FDA Warns Abbot Laboratories About Misleading Information On Promotional DVD For HIV Drug: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sent a warning letter to Abbot Laboratories citing serious violations about a recent promotional DVD for its drug Kaletra (lopinavir/ritonavir). The violations include suggesting that Kaletra is safer, more effective, and can be used successfully in circumstances other than what has been studied. Abbot has accepted the consequences, stated that the particular DVD has been discontinued, and plans to comply with the requests made by the FDA. For more information, see the related Reuters article.

Dr. Joel Weisman, One Of The First Physicians To Detect AIDS, Dies At Age 66: Dr. Joel D. Weisman, one of the first physicians to detect the AIDS epidemic and who became a national advocate for AIDS research, treatment, and prevention, died on July 18th due to heart disease. In 1980, after noticing that 3 male gay patients had the same symptoms, Weisman referred them to Michael S. Gottlieb, an immunologist at UCLA, who also had a patient with similar symptoms. Together, Weisman and Gottlieb wrote a report that indicated the official start of the AIDS epidemic. For more information, please visit the LA Times.

Drug Susceptibility Testing Improves Survival Of HIV Patients: Researchers found that HIV-infected patients whose drug regimens were guided by susceptibility testing (sensitivity testing or drug resistance testing) were significantly less likely to die than patients who were not. The study was conducted in 10 U.S. HIV clinics on 2,699 patients, of which 915 patients underwent genotypic or phenotypic susceptibility testing. For more information, please see the study in the Annals of Internal Medicine (abstract) and the related MedPage Today article.