“I’d always told my friends, ‘When I grow up, I want to be a guy who gets called in if there’s an outbreak’.”Arinjay Banerjee, a Kolkata-born and Mumbai-bred virologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, had prophesied some years ago before he actually got called in last month to join the team of Canadian scientists that has managed to successfully isolate a strain of the coronavirus and grown samples in a lab to help study the pathogen responsible for the global outbreak of Covid-19.Working at a secure containment facility at the University of Toronto using samples taken from two patients in Canada, the joint team of researchers -- Samira Mubareka from Sunnybrook Hospital, Rob Kozak of the University of Toronto, and Karen Mossman, also from McMaster University -- confirmed last week that it had isolated and propagated the virus that will help inform global response to the worsening pandemic as the world scrambles for a cure.While India became the fifth country to successfully isolate the virus strain that will help expedite the development of drugs, vaccines and rapid diagnostic kits in the country, the accomplishment for Banerjee’s team means that researchers and scientists across the world now have Canadian sources for access to the pathogen without them having to undertake the complicated step of shipping live virus across international borders.“It was a tremendous team effort which will allow us to generate stocks of virus, without which you cannot determine the efficacy of a drug or develop vaccines. The more isolates we have, the better chances we have at understanding if the virus is changing and if different virus isolates behave differently in human cells. The process could have been long, but with our combined expertise, we did it in one week,” said Banerjee who said that his team was talking to all interested parties and would be sharing the virus with other research groups working to develop vaccines and drugs. “We are currently characterizing the virus stocks and institutions are working on getting the appropriate paperwork in place to receive the virus.”The 29-year-old graduate in microbiology and biochemistry from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai with a Masters from the National Institute of Virology in Pune, it was a rare combination of having completed his PhD on bats and MERS (a species of coronavirus which infects humans, bats, and camels) at University of Saskatchewan, Canada that gave Banerjee the necessary expertise to culture the agent, believed to have jumped to humans from bats and triggered the current pandemic.Living in times when the world has been witnessing a surge in epidemics emerging from the family of coronaviruses that have their origins in bats, Banerjee is currently pursuing postdoctoral research on how bats harbour emerging viruses.What fired his curiosity was the Ebola outbreak in 2014, when the role of bats as reservoirs for a variety of viruses that cause significant disease in humans was being discussed. “I was instantly intrigued and wanted to research this question,” recalls Banerjee. In a scientific paper last year, Banerjee observed that with the advent of next generation sequencing technology and increased surveillance of wild animal species, over 200 novel coronaviruses had been identified in bats and approximately 35% of the bat virome sequenced were composed of coronaviruses in 2019.“This coronavirus seems to be more easily transmissible relative to other coronaviruses, including ones that cause SARS and MERS,” he adds but helps assuage fears pointing at “data that indicates that the virus is less pathogenic... Good public health practices and good hygiene will help us control this pandemic.”While Canada has recently announced $27 million in funding for Covid-19 projects, Banerjee is being funded by a federal fellowship that supports his work on coronaviruses, bats and their interactions. “We shall all get through this through collaboration and good science.” But before that there’s a myth he wants to bust. “This coronavirus was not made in a lab. Please do not spread rumours,” says Banerjee, who along with his professor at University of Saskatchewan were dubbed ‘Batmen’ three years ago.You may want to believe this white caped crusader in his lab coat, who was among the few worldwide to unlock the mystery behind bat “super immunity” to fatal respiratory diseases, a knowledge that could lead to new therapies for slowing down disease progression in humans and even reduce death rates in the future.