A European Union funded project is seeking to find new antibiotics using previously unknown bacteria from the ocean floor.

The project has ships in the Lyngen Fjord of northern Norway collecting soil and animals from the bottom of the Arctic Ocean hoping to find new bacteria that could be used for a new generation of antibiotics.

“If no one finds new antibiotics for common infections, what will happen is we will go back to the pre-antibiotic age in which a simple cut could turn into an infection that becomes deadly,” Marcel Jaspars told CNN.

Major drug manufacturers are not creating new antibiotics despite the rise of anti-biotic resistant bacteria because of the prohibitive costs for bringing a new drug to the marketplace.   Jaspars says that while bacteria have developed resistance to the antibiotics of the last 30 years, they can’t defend against something they’ve never seen.

“In the past, bacteria and fungi have been the main sources for new antibiotics,” Jaspars explained. “In fact, about 70% of our antibiotics still come from nature, normally from sediment samples and soil samples from land. But now, by looking at the ocean, we hope to find new life forms which give us new chemistry that might be able to treat bacterial infections.”

Researchers say that several of the new bacteria discovered on the ocean floor have shown promise for creating new antibiotics.