Scientists have discovered something desperately needed in the fight against drug-resistant superbugs: a new type of antibiotic that cannot be resisted.

Kim Lewis, a microbiologist and professor at Northeastern University, reported the discovery of a new compound that not only kills deadly infections like MRSA, but destroys their cell walls so the pathogens will have difficulty mutating to resist it.

Many of the antibiotics in use today were discovered many years ago and since then, microbes have begun to evolve into resistant strains that make the antibiotics ineffective. For example, the World Health Organization reports that 480,000 people developed multi-drug resistant tuberculosis in 2013 and an estimated 210,000 people died.

Bacteria that cause a variety of illnesses, such as urinary tract infections and pneumonia, are becoming more difficult to treat with antibiotics. Many infections acquired during hospital stays are caused by methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a highly resistant form of staph.

The increasing resistance to antibiotics, combined with few new antibiotic discoveries, has led the World Health Organization to warn us that we are approaching a “post-antibiotic era” where people could die from minor infections and injuries.

Luckily, there has been a breakthrough in antibiotic research. Most antibiotics used today come from microbes in the soil. Soil antibiotics have proven difficult to culture in a lab until recently and thus 99 percent of the microbes to be under-researched according to Medical News Today.

Prof. Lewis and his team had a breakthrough for studying soil microbes. Using something they call a ‘diffusion chamber’, the team was able to grow colonies of bacteria in lab settings for study. By repeatedly using their diffusion chamber, the team were able to test 10,000 bacterial colonies and see if any stopped the growth of MRSA.

The colonies produced 25 potential antibiotics, including the powerful teixobactin.

Teixobactin killed a wide range of pathogens in the lab, including MRSA. Further testing in mice showed that the microbe fought lung and skin infections effectively. Most importantly, repeated exposure to teixobactin did not produce any mutations capable of resisting the antibiotic. Because teixobactin attacks the cell wall of the deadly pathogens, no amount of mutation can resist the antibiotic.

The team concludes “the properties of this compound suggest a path towards developing antibiotics that are likely to avoid development of resistance.”

The study was originally published in the journal Nature.