On my MySpace blog I decried the new cervical cancer vaccine from Merck -- it could save up to 193,000 lives a year but is being offered at a cost prohibitive to many consumers. Some studies showed even 100 percent protection against the HPV virus which causes the cancer.

I thought I had seen "bad."

I had, to borrow a phrase made famous by The Matrix, no idea how deep the rabbit-hole went.

More than 30,000 men in America have late-stage prostate cancer. 27,350 men are projected to die of prostate cancer in 2006, with 234,000 cases projected to be diagnosed -- 9% of all cancer related deaths in men. Provenge is a promising vaccine which:

Provenge...has the potential to become the first cancer vaccine to get approval from the FDA. Two phase 3 trials have shown that 33% of patients taking it were alive after 36 months[.]

Total cost of Provenge treatment? $20,000.

Or HIV: Tenofovir, a groundbreaking HIV drug from Gilead Sciences, was shown as early as 1994 to act as an AIDS vaccine. When given to apes without HIV, the apes subsequently didn't catch HIV when exposed to the virus. This could save lives by the day. Total cost?

Gilead, based in Foster City, Calif., sells tenofovir under the brand name Viread. It also sells Truvada, a pill combining tenofovir with another AIDS medicine, emtricitabine or Emtriva. A year's supply of Viread costs about $5,300 and Truvada about $8,800.

Oh yeah, don't even think about trying to get this HIV vaccine in America, by the way.

The company insists it has no intention of adding to that bottom line by marketing Viread as a preventive drug. It says the ethical, legal and regulatory challenges in the U.S. would be too great.

One positive note, though, Gilead Sciences said it would sell the drug "at-cost" to poor and developing countries were it to be used as a preventive. Now, currently an AIDS vaccine from Targeted Genetics is being tested in a multinational trial. I hope Gilead sticks to their word.

And here's my personal favorite.

A new personalized treatment for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma is entering into Phase 3 clinical trials. FavId, an anti-cancer treatment and MyVax, a cancer regimen from Genitope, Inc., use patient-specific DNA signatures on the surfaces of tumors and other cancerous cells to create personalized drug treatments which have an astounding rate of success.

Lymphoma vaccine pioneer Ronald Levy of Stanford University began testing personalized vaccines in the late 1980s, and the work was taken up by Levy associates at the National Cancer Institute. Though those early clinical trials were small, the results were impressive: many patients treated in the late 1980s remain alive and have never relapsed.

Almost twenty years of life added. Major breakthrough.

Some Wall Street analysts estimate that FavId will be priced at between $40,000 to $60,000 a year.

Thousands of men will die. Thousands of women will die.

All because they can't afford to survive.

Survival of the richest. This is Babylon.