London: A vaccine that would prevent the HIV virus from progressing in the body could be ready by 2012, says Luc Montagnier, the medical researcher who has won this year's Nobel Prize for medicine.

Montagnier, director of the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention, one of three researchers who were awarded the Nobel for medicine on Monday, said a treatment could be possible with a "therapeutic" rather than preventive vaccine.

He said results for a therapeutic vaccine, which stops a disease from flourishing after it has taken hold, might be published in three or four years if there is financial backing.

"I think it will be possible with a therapeutic vaccine rather than preventative vaccinations. We would give it to people who are already infected," he said.

Montagnier and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi of the Pasteur Institute in Paris were awarded the Nobel Prize for leading the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which can cause AIDS, 25 years ago.

The third winner of the Nobel was German scientist Harald zur Hausen, who found the human papilloma virus (HPV) that causes cervical cancer, the second most common cancer among women. IANS