On Nov. 1, 2021, for the first time in the U.S., the transmission of COVID-19 from pet parent to pet was documented genetically as part of a study by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope.

The published findings from the ongoing study appeared in the journal One Health. This was one of five pilot studies nationwide examining COVID in animals. The TGen study, however, was the only one to include genomic sequencing of the virus from both pet and human samples.