Alzheimer’s sufferers may be able to live with the disease without the devastating symptoms within the next few decades, scientists said as they were awarded the Brain Prize for their work fighting the illness.

Professor Michel Goedert, of Cambridge University, who discovered the importance of tau protein in Alzheimer’s said he could see a time when dementia became a chronic illness like HIV.

Prof Goedert who shares the one million euro Brain Prize with four colleagues, said: “Alzheimer’s will become something like HIV. It’s still there but it has been contained, or whittled down by drug treatments.

“It will disappear as a major problem from society.”

Prof Goedert was awarded the prize alongside Professors John Hardy and Bart De Strooper of University College London who developed the hypothesis that Alzheimer’s is caused by a build-up of amyloid protein in the brain, and Professor Christian Haass of Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich.

Prof Hardy said in the future, treatments for Alzheimer's would be taken before the disease developed to prevent symptoms rather than trying to reverse them. He said may drug trials had failed because they had started when the disease was too well established.