Chapel Hill, N.C. — An HIV prevention study by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Medicine has been named the 2011 Breakthrough of the Year by the journal Science.

The study found that early treatment with antiretroviral therapy reduced HIV transmission by at least 96 percent.

“From the time the first AIDS drugs were developed in the mid-1990s, our UNC team of virologists, pharmacologists and physicians has been working on the idea that antiretrovirals might make people less contagious,” Myron Cohen, UNC professor of medicine, microbiology and epidemiology, said in a statement. “By 2000, the UNC study team thought the idea was strong enough to try to prove it."

The study was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health.