A French researcher who won the Nobel Prize on Monday for groundbreaking work on HIV and AIDS said the search for a vaccine has been "a succession of failures."

Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and with Luc Montagnier, who were awarded the prestigious prize for their discovery of HIV, said that working on the disease has been both frustrating and fascinating.

She said that when they isolated the virus 25 years ago they naively hoped they would be able to prevent the global AIDS epidemic that followed.

"We were very naive," she told The Associated Press. "We naively thought that the discovery of the virus would allow us to quickly learn more about it,"

"To develop diagnostic tests - which has been done - and to develop treatments, which has also been done to a large extent and, most of all, develop a vaccine that would prevent the global epidemic," she said.

"On that point, I must say that until now it has been a succession of failures, failures linked to the complexity of the interaction of this virus with human beings."

The Nobel Assembly said Barre-Sinoussi and Montagnier’s discovery was one prerequisite for understanding the biology of AIDS and its treatment with antiviral drugs.

The pair’s work in the early 1980s made it possible to study the virus closely.

"The combination of prevention and treatment has substantially decreased spread of the disease and dramatically increased life expectancy among treated patients," the Nobel citation said.

Barre-Sinoussi said the hunt for a vaccine will require "far more fundamental research to try to better understand the interaction between this virus and the human body."

There had been some dispute in the past over who discovered the HIV virus, with Dr Robert Gallo, director of the Institute for Human Virology at the University of Maryland, claiming he was the first.

Though it is now accepted that Barre-Sinoussi and Montagnier were the first, Dr Gallo said this week it was "a disappointment" not to be honoured for his work, but he said all three of the award’s recipients deserved the honour.

Barre-Sinoussi, 61, and Montagnier, 76, shared the Nobel Prize with Germany’s Harald zur Hausen, who discovered human papilloma viruses (HPV) that cause cervical cancer.

No more than three people can share a Nobel prize.