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Phoenix666 writes:

Inspired by viruses that attack and kill bacteria, researchers at The Rockefeller University have created an entirely new weapon against disease-causing bacteria that shows great promise for treating drug-resistant infections.

In work described in the Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences on April 17, the team engineered molecules that accomplish something viruses do much better than the human immune system; namely, targeting specific carbohydrate molecules that appear on the surfaces of bacterial cells.

"Bacteria-infecting viruses have molecules that recognize and tightly bind to these common components of the bacterial cell's surface that the human immune system largely misses. We have co-opted these molecules, and we've put them to work helping the human immune system fight off microbial pathogens," says Vincent A. Fischetti, head of the Laboratory of Bacterial Pathogenesis and Immunology.

In experiments with mice, Fischetti's team used this approach to successfully treat life-threatening infections by MRSA, a bacterium that is resistant to conventional antibiotics—results that suggest they may have found a new way to fight superbugs like MRSA.

Original Submission