A vaccine that prevents infections known to cause cervical cancer could be available to women within three years. By guarding against human papilloma virus, it could save thousands of lives and may end the need for smears tests.
The vaccine would be given to girls before they are sexually active reports BBC online.
Trials have shown a jab can offer 100% protection against strains of HPV linked to about 70% of cervical cancers.
Some forms of the HPV virus only cause genital warts, but others cause cervical cancer. It is estimated up to half of the young women in Britain have been infected with a high-risk strain of HPV by the time they are 30.
Since cervical cancer is the second most common cause of cancer death in women worldwide, preventing HPV would save many lives.
Both Glaxo Smith Kline and Merck Sharp & Dohme have developed a vaccine against HPV and are in a race to get their products approved.
The two vaccines are being tested in thousands of women around the world, including the UK. These will seek to confirm the vaccines' effectiveness and safely.
Cancer Research UK's Dr Anne Szarewski, who is trialing GSK's vaccine in the Margaret Pyke Centre in London, said experts hoped that a course of three injections over six months could provide life-long immunity.
She said, "We know that certain types of the HPV virus, which is sexually transmitted, are the main cause of over 99 per cent of cervical cancer cases. With any disease caused by a virus, the best way to stop it is to prevent it with a vaccine. I do feel that the work we are doing on this vaccine is the most exciting development in cervical cancer research in many years.

The Sun's current spotty outbreak was on the wane and should reach a minimum by 2006.

The past 70 years has seen the longest and most intense period of sunspot activity for 8,000 years, according to scientists who have reconstructed a record of the Sun's last 11,000 years, nature.com said.
Solar physicist Sami Solanki from the Max Planck Institute in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, and his colleagues found in November 2003 that the Sun is more active now than at any time in the past 1,000 years.
This, along with several record-breaking solar storms that occurred at around the same time, has triggered intense debate about why the Sun is now so active.
However, Solanki's latest data reveals that before 8,000 years ago, the Sun went through several short periods where it was just as active as it is today.
This suggests that the current high is part of the Sun's normal activity and that it will probably calm down again, returning to normal levels within the next few decades, he says.
Sunspots are temporary dark patches on the Sun, caused when its magnetic field 'pinches' at the surface. The magnetic field is generated by hot, ionised gas that swirls around inside the star, acting like a dynamo.
"But we don't really know how the Sun's dynamo works," Solanki says. The new record will help solar physicists to model how that dynamo changes over thousands of years.
Scientists already have a good observational record of sunspots that dates back to the early seventeenth century.
This shows that the Sun's activity varies on cycles that last roughly 11 and 88 years, although scientists are not yet sure why these cycles exist.
David Hathaway, a solar physicist from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Centre in Huntsville, Alabama, recently predicted that the Sun's current spotty outbreak was on the wane and should reach a minimum by 2006, although this will still be significantly more active that in previous centuries.

Darwin famously realized that the eye would be a key test for his theory of evolution by natural selection. He suggested gradual steps from an "imperfect and simple" form, and modern scientists have no trouble believing that the eye evolved from a single light-detecting cell.
Now the miniscule marine worm Platynereis dumerilii, whose crude light perception seems to have stood it in good stead for millennia, hints at an answer to this question.
Its few light-sensing cells come in two types: one is of a type seen almost exclusively in vertebrates, and one is seen in insects, according to nature.com. Could a worm like Platynereis have been the father of the eye?
Insect eyes are known to consist of an array of compound lenses, whereas vertebrate eyes contain a single lens. But they are also made of different types of cells: insects' eyes are built up with cells called rhabdomeric photoreceptors; vertebrates use ciliary photoreceptors. The most obvious difference between these cells is in the way the cells increase their surface area to accommodate large numbers of light sensors. Rhabdomeric cells are covered in little finger-like protrusions. Ciliary cells sport hair-like cilia that extend outwards and branch out like tiny umbrellas.
Joachim Wittbrodt of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, and his colleagues have found that Platynereis has rhabdomeric receptors in its tiny eyes, and ciliary cells in its equally tiny brain. The ciliary cells perhaps regulate its daily activity cycle by sensing light, Wittbrodt guesses.

One hundred jam sandwiches have been hidden in remote forests in an attempt to catch a mammal believed to have been extinct in England for 100 years.
According to ananova.com, scientists will discreetly monitor the traps, squashed into plastic feeding tubes, for hairs and other DNA traces of pine martens.
Local naturalists have logged 35 suspected marten sightings on the densely wooded fringes of the North York Moors since 1990.
None were conclusive but an experienced wildlife photographer has given an accurate description of a marten, which triggered the new move.
"We think that most of the 35 reports were probably mistaken identity, but some were very convincing," said Brian Walker, of the Forestry Commission.