Researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health have found that an injection of antiretroviral drugs can give 100 percent protection from HIV.

Monkeys were injected with the drugs in two separate trials, with protection lasting a month. However, research suggests that such an injection could last for up to three months, reports the New York Times.

People taking PrEP in the form of a daily Truvada pill have a super-high rate of protection (98 percent), if they take the pill every day. However, the effectiveness of the treatment goes down if you miss multiple doses.

An injection of this kind would erase the fear of missing your daily dose — it’d just be an injection every few months.

The treatment would be of greatest benefit to serodiscordant couples — where one person is HIV-positive and the other is HIV-negative.

Dr Wafaa El-Sadr, an AIDS expert at Colombia, tells the Times that a preliminary human trial is set to start later this year. A larger trial that could lead to widespread usage is still a number of years away.