"A team led by engineering researchers at Dartmouth College has engineered a new antibacterial agent to essentially hide from the human immune system and treat life-threatening infections caused by MRSA and other types of S. aureus," reports AtomsTalk.

"The agent is the first lysin-based treatment with the potential to be used multiple times on a single patient which makes it ideal to treat particularly persistent drug-resistant and drug-sensitive infections.

"This team described about this new agent in a paper which recently appeared in Science Advances.

"S. aureus as mentioned can quickly gain resistance to antibiotic agents. Lysins which are basically enzymes naturally produced by microbes and associated viruses have shown potential to treat S. aureus in recent years.

"'Lysins are one of the most promising next-generation antibiotics. They kill drug-sensitive and drug-resistant bacteria with equal efficacy, they can potentially suppress new resistance phenotypes, and they also have this laser-like precision,' said Karl Griswold, corresponding author and associate professor of engineering at Dartmouth."