Acinetobacter pittii (A. pittii), a type of bacteria, is evolving to become more resistant to antibiotics and is finding ways to survive in the harsh environment of the International Space Station.

Awards, honors, prizes and achievements for the month of August.

About 12,000 bacteria and viruses collected in a sampling from public transit systems and hospitals around the world from 2015 to 2017 had never before been identified.

Two distinct diagnostic tests, a host/pathogen RNA sequencing platform, and spatially-resolved tissue mapping tools were created by a multidisciplinary team of Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital-led researchers and used to map SARS-CoV-2 infections at the height of the initial COVID-19 outbreak in New York City.

An intercampus research team at Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell’s Ithaca campus has been awarded a five-year, $3.65 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a quick, inexpensive method for accurately diagnosing urinary tract infections in kidney transplant patients by carrying out molecular profiling of cell-free DNA in urine.

With the need for wide scale COVID-19 testing to allow societies reopen safely, a group from Weill Cornell Medicine and other academic medical centers and research organizations have announced the launch of a global competition for low-cost, high-quality and scalable COVID-19 tests, called the COVID-19 XPRIZE, in a letter published Aug. 20 in Nature Biotechnology.

Physicians and scientists at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian have rapidly mobilized to confront the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing a broad spectrum of expertise on the critical issues the disease is posing to healthcare workers and public health officials.

With the goal of advancing the fight against COVID-19, the Partners of Citadel and Citadel Securities have made a $2 million gift to Weill Cornell Medicine to develop new approaches to protect people from the disease and identify new cases of it.

Weill Cornell Medicine scientists have built the first global database of clinical trials testing a rapidly expanding approach to cancer treatment that involves genetically modifying immune cells to recognize specific targets on a patient’s cancer cells and attack them.

After extensive data gathering and analysis—plus a worldwide media Frenzy—NASA’s famed Twins Study has begun to yield results.

Awards, honors, prizes and achievements for the month of May.

Long-term spaceflight causes more changes to gene expression than shorter trips, especially to the immune system and DNA repair systems, according to research by Weill Cornell Medicine and NASA investigators as part of NASA’s Twins Study, which followed the only set of identical twin astronauts for more than two years.