With antibiotic resistance growing all the time, researchers are looking for alternatives to fight infections — in people and animals, too. They just may have found some hope in a molecule made by pigs.

Swine dysentery is a bacterial infection that causes serious clinical signs and death in growing pigs. There’s no preventative vaccine — only antibiotics to treat the disease.

After years of analysis, researchers found that pigs that produce more of an immune defense peptide called pBD-5 were less likely to get sick from the bacteria. After the researchers created pBD-5 in the lab, they showed that the synthetic version also inhibited bacterial growth.

In pigs, at least, this discovery may help to boost immunity to fight infections, without having to rely on antibiotics.