HONG KONG, Sept. 7 -- A compound named NP16 that can inhibit methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) was found in a study done by the University of Hong Kong which made the results public on Thursday.

Conventionally, antibiotics are used to cure bacteria, which, however, seems not to be an effective and sustainable way of controlling infections and may lead to the problem of drug resistance.

The university's research team started to look for new strategies to combat antimicrobial resistance in 2009. By using a chemical genetics screening facility, researchers screened more than 50,000 structurally diverse small molecule compounds to identify compounds reducing the virulence of MRSA.

The team recently found that NP16 show strong inhibition on the production of staphyloxanthin, the golden-coloured pigment in Staphylococcus aureus, which has been known for its ability to promote bacterial invasion.

Richard Kao Yi-tsun, Associate Professor of Department of Microbiology of the university, said that NP16 does not kill the bacteria, but disarm them and reduce their invasion ability, so that they can easily be cleared by the immune system, which, therefore, will not trigger the antidrug problem.

"Our approach of employing non-antibiotic drugs to treat MRSA infections by disarming the defensive shield of invading pathogens has offered new hope and new strategies for the treatment of bacterial infections related to multidrug resistant pathogens," Kao said.

This is the world's first study to apply chemical genetics to tackle MRSA infection, which has won the 1st Prize of the Innovation Academy Award in the 4th International Conference on Prevention &Infection Control (ICPIC 2017) in Geneva, Switzerland.

The findings of the study were published in mBio, the top international scientific journal in the field of Microbiology, in September 2017.