He may not be Jacques Cousteau, but William Fenical from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego is exploring the ocean in a whole new way.

According to a paper published in Angewandte Chemie, his team recently unearthed a new chemical compound from the sea that may become an effective treatment against the potentially deadly bacteria anthrax and MRSA.

The compound comes from a microorganism known as Streptomyces, which the team first collected off the coast of Santa Barbara, CA, in 2012. They named the unique compound anthracimycin, and they hope it can be developed into a new antibiotic drug.

Fenical worked together with a San Diego-based biopharmaceutical company to analyze anthracimycin with a technique known as spectroscopy. Their initial testing showed that the compound was potent in killing both anthrax (Bacillus anthracis) and MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus).

Fenical says:

“The real importance of this work is the fact that anthracimycin has a new and unique chemical structure. The discovery of truly new antibiotic compounds is quite rare. This discovery adds to many previous discoveries that show that marine bacteria are genetically and chemically unique.”