After six years of trying, scientists have discovered a way to genetically modify mosquitoes so they produce sperm that will only conceive male offspring.

Female mosquitoes are the ones who bite people and pass along malaria, so scientists think if they can significantly lower the number of female mosquitoes the rate of malaria will also go down. In their research published in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers created a modified strain of mosquitoes that produced 95% male offspring.

When they introduced the strain to a five caged wild mosquito populations, the modified pests eradicated entire mosquito populations in four of them. There were too few females for the populations to survive. The researchers hope that this same scenario could happen in the wild, and malaria-carrying mosquitoes could die off.