HIV vaccine likely due in five years

A therapeutic vaccine to treat HIV infection is likely to be developed within five years, said Nobel Prize laureate in medicine Luc Montagnier .

"I think it is not impossible to do it within a few years," he told a news conference together with Francoise Barre-Sinoussi. The two French scientists shared half of this year's Nobel Prize for medicine for discovering the virus of AIDS. The other half goes to a German scientist for finding the cause of cervical cancer.

The 76-year-old director of the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention said that his colleagues had been working on such vaccine for a decade, but he did not elaborate as to why he believed it can be developed in "four to five years".

"Our job, of course, is to find complementary treatment to eradicate the infection," he said.