Every year, antibiotics save millions of lives, but this may not last forever. The bacteria that cause infections are getting smarter and continuously evolve genes to become resistant to antibiotics, which makes it harder to kill them. In many cases, using stronger drugs can bypass this problem, but some ‘super-bugs’ are developing resistance to every drug we have. For example, the bacterium Acinetobacter baumannii has recently been classified as a global threat that kills thousands of people every year, which placed it on a top six ‘most wanted’ list for multi drug-resistant bacteria. Worryingly, this drug resistance seems to develop faster than ‘standard’ evolution would allow, making it difficult to keep up with developing new effective drugs.