The emergence of multidrug-resistant bacteria has made minor bacterial infections incurable with many existing antibiotics. Instead of developing new antibiotics, phage lysins represent a promising alternative class of antimicrobial that is resistance-proof.
Phage lysins are phage-encoded peptidoglycan hydrolases that cleave the bonds in peptidoglycan chains of the bacteria outer cell wall. When applied exogenously to bacteria as purified recombinant proteins, lysins rapidly hydrolyze the peptidoglycan layer, resulting in cell lysis and bacterial death. Additionally, lysins generally only kill the species of bacteria infected by the encoding bacteriophage.

We have developed a lysin engineering platform to design better lysins. By leveraging the modular structural features of lysin, we can effectively engineer lysins with the desired properties, such as higher killing activity or broader killing spectrum.