The gap in AIDS treatment between rich and poor nations must be narrowed, HIV virus co-discoverer Luc Montagnier said while receiving a prestigious award in Rome Monday.
''There is still a great disparity of treatment between the countries of the South and the countries of the North and only 30% of the world's poor have access to HIV drugs,'' the 2008 Nobel Prize winner said as he accepted Rome's top prize for achievement, the Lupa Capitolina (Capitoline Wolf).
''The AIDS epidemic is currently under control in the North of the world and many efforts have been made to spread the results of scientific research to the countries of the South but there are still great difficulties in those countries''.
Montagnier said he was working with scientists around the world including Italy on AIDS research.
The next big goal, he said, was to develop a vaccine to treat AIDS patients - a platform for a future vaccine to prevent AIDS.
He said it would take about four or five years to get a therapeutic vaccine which ''could pave the way for a preventive vaccine, which will take longer''.
Montagnier, 76, co-recipient of the Nobel Prize, stressed that funds should continue to flow, even at a time of financial crisis, towards ''basic'' AIDS research because ''there are still many mysteries about how the virus works''.
''A lot of research is still needed because unfortunately current therapies do not lead to a cure,'' he said.
As well as the therapeutic vaccine for AIDS victims, Italian researchers present at the awards ceremony said they were working with the French scientist in two other areas: a vaccine to prevent mothers passing HIV to their children in their milk; and the search for substances to boost immune systems so they are more receptive to the therapeutic vaccine.
This research was recently launched at Milan's San Raffaele Institute and Rome's Tor Vergata University.
Tor Vergata's Vittorio Colizzi said work on the milk vaccine was going ahead in Africa and named nitric oxide as one of the possible substances to ''reawaken'' immune systems.
Presenting the French virologist with the statuette of Romulus and Remus and their wolf stepmother, Rome mayor Gianni Alemanno echoed Montagnier's call to provide more AIDS drugs to poor nations.
''It is unthinkable that while western countries are lengthening their lifespans, there is still a massacre of the innocents in Africa and other countries,'' Alemanno said.
Montagnier got last year's Nobel Prize for Medicine for HIV discovery jointly with another French virologist, Francoise Barre'-Sinoussi, 61.
