Not only does it protect our children from the most common form of viral infantile gastroenteritis, but rotavirus vaccine may also help in the fight against cancer. It could also make tumors that develop resistance to immunotherapy vulnerable again.

Picky about food? Never like koalas. Such Australian marsupials would be willing to starve rather than give up their favorite eucalyptus species. Researchers from the University of Queensland began to think that gut bacteria play a major role in koala's food preferences. Hence the idea that a microbiota transplant can help koalas to have a more varied diet, making them less vulnerable to the progressive destruction of their habitats. A hypothesis confirmed on the pages of Animal Microbiome.

Luigi Aurisicchio, president of Vitares, tells about a very special experience. In 2017 he participated in a scientific expedition to California, to the El Paso Zoo, with the aim of treating the breast cancer of an elephant named Juno, a splendid 50-year-old female. Today, she is better and she is waiting for a new treatment, which will be administered in these days.

How are penguins doing? Considering global warming and pollution, probably not so well. In order to investigate the health state of such "sentinel" species, scientists at the universities of Plymouth and Siena completed a first of its kind study evaluating genetic and immune stability in a colony of Adelia penguins by just doing blood tests.

As far as antibiotic resistance is concerned, this year has not been good so far. Resistant pathogens are everywhere: the emergency, initially limited to health care settings, has now spread and no longer concerns only human beings. Resistant bacteria have tripled in farm animals and have even been isolated in the Arctic or in wildlife populations.

Summer: sun, holidays but also ... mosquitoes! At the top of the list of the most annoying animals, the tiger mosquito has been tormenting Italian people for about 30 years. Since then, we have fought the stinging enemy with insecticides, lamps, sprays and coils, up to more sophisticated techniques such as genetic manipulation. Now researchers have recently discovered their weak point: tiger mosquitoes need a particular bacterium to reproduce.

Although they do not use tobacco, dogs can get lung cancer exactly like us. However, precision medicine opens up new perspectives. This is directed against a molecular target or a genetic mutation expressed by the tumor.

Gene therapy and nanodrugs: this is how we may fight the HIV virus in the near future. Researchers at Temple University in Philadelphia completely eradicated the virus from mice, using latest-generation antiretroviral drugs along with Crispr-Cas9, the genetic "cut and sew" technique. The results have been published in Nature Medicine.