Around 10 years ago, some-where on the campus of the Hogwarts-like St Xavier’s College in Mumbai, a graduate student of microbiology and biochemistry, told his friends that he wanted to become that guy who gets called in when there is an outbreak. Those words proved prophetic as Dr Arinjay Banerjee, 29, is today part of a team of researchers in Canada that is trying to find a cure for Covid-19.
Kolkata-born Banerjee, along with Dr Samira Mubareka and Dr Robert Kozak of Sunnybrook Research Institute and the University of Toronto, isolated SARSCoV-2, the virus behind the current pandemic. “Having completed my PhD on bats and MERS coronavirus [at the University of Saskatchewan], I had the necessary expertise to culture this virus,”said Banerjee, a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada-funded postdoctoral research fellow at the McMaster University in Ontario. “Dr Mubareka, who is an infectious diseases physician and researcher, spoke with me and we decided to try and isolate the virus from clinical specimens [from patients]. Dr Kozak [clinical microbiologist] also enabled us as part of the team and eventually confirmed the presence of the virus using his diagnostic tests after we had cultured it. It was a tremendous team effort.”
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