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Where did SARS-CoV-2 come from?

Although evidence points towards a bat origin for SARS-CoV-2, the transmission route of the virus from bats to humans remains unknown. We recently analyzed existing evidence to propose possible scenarios that may explain how SARS-CoV-2 evolved to cause the largest known coronavirus pandemic in humans.

Full article: Trends in Ecology & Evolution

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Meet Dr. Arinjay Banerjee

Welcome to SciSection! Joining us in today's interview is our special guest Dr. Arinjay Banerjee, a postdoctoral researcher at McMaster University who was a member of the team that isolated the novel coronavirus 🥼! We'll be learning about his career as a virologist studying bats and coronaviruses, a journey that started six years before the COVID-19 outbreak; his involvement in isolating the novel coronavirus, as well as his current research moving forward and how he hopes to help prevent future pandemics.

In this interview, I speak with Anna Yang from SciSection and discuss my journey as a virologist studying bats and coronaviruses.

Link to interview: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-sci-section-30834559/episode/isolating-covid-19-interview-with-dr-arinjay-71859098/

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How are we enabling studies on COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2?

Dr. Karen Mossman and Dr. Arinjay Banerjee of McMaster University (https://www.mcmaster.ca) were part of the Sunnybrook Research Institute, University of Toronto and McMaster teams that isolated SARS-CoV-2 the agent responsible for the ongoing outbreak of COVID-19. They are currently leading studies in virus-host responses.

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Bat influenza viruses – what do we know and what do we need to know?

A distinct lineage of bat influenza viruses was first reported in 2012. The discovery of bat flu viruses raised a lot of questions about the ability of these viruses to infect other mammals. Studies have now identified that bat flu viruses (H17N10 and H18N11) can infect cells that express human, bat, chicken and pig versions of the virus receptor. These data suggest that in theory, bat flu viruses may be able to infect humans, chickens and pigs. The good news – experimental infections in mice and ferrets have shown that although these animals can be infected with bat influenza viruses, infected animals are unable to transmit to other experimental animals. Thus, bat flu viruses have not acquired the ability to efficiently transmit from ferrets-to-ferrets and mice-to-mice. However, bat flu viruses did transmit from infected bats to uninfected bats in the same study.  

Most importantly, recent studies have identified the receptor that allows bat influenza viruses to enter cells and multiply. This receptor is a critical player in our immune response – Major histocompatibility complex class II (MHCII). The immunological consequences of using this receptor for entering mammalian cells have not been studied yet. Future studies will identify the effect of MHC-II-mediated virus entry on host immune responses, and the ability of bat flu viruses to modulate antiviral responses. We also do not know how bats respond to their own flu viruses. Do they become sick? Do they quickly recover and mount a protective immune response? How do bat populations maintain influenza viruses? Can we learn from bats to harness their immunity strategy for our own benefit? There are many questions that remain unanswered…

“The discovery and ongoing characterization of bat influenza viruses highlights the unpredictable nature of these viruses and the need for more intense study of their evolutionary diversity and pathobiology, especially in non-human hosts”

Read our full scientific forum discussion here.

Picture credit: Dr. Brock Fenton

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How do bats deal with virus infections?

In this story, Rachel Ehrenberg from Knowable Magazine takes a deep dive into our research to understand factors that may allow bats to coexist with their viruses. This story highlights our work alongside the work of multiple other bat virologists, epidemiologists and disease ecologists.

Link to original article: https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/health-disease/2020/why-do-bats-have-so-many-viruses

Picture credit: pixnio.com

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Time is of the essence

NAOMI ZUREVINSKI
Mar 31, 2020

For Dr. Arinjay Banerjee (PhD’18), time is of the essence as scientists across Canada work towards understanding, treating and preventing the spread of COVID-19.

Since completing his PhD in veterinary microbiology at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine (WCVM) at the University of Saskatchewan (USask), Banerjee has been researching how human cells and bat cells respond to coronaviruses—work that has become even more pressing in the current COVID-19 pandemic. 

“What I am doing right now is studying how the [COVID-19] virus interacts with the immune response. That is something that we think is very important to understand, because historically, coronaviruses that cause severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) can shut down human immune responses, and that’s why you have a bad disease prognosis and outcome,” Banerjee said. 

"What I am doing right now is studying how the [COVID-19] virus interacts with the immune response."

Dr. Arinjay Banerjee

“We want to establish that understanding for this virus and see if it is equally potent in shutting down human immune responses, or if the virus is less potent in shutting down immune responses. Either way, that’s going to be good information for researchers designing drugs and vaccines.” 

Banerjee is currently a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and Michael .G. DeGroote post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Infectious Disease Research and McMaster Immunology Research Centre at McMaster University. When COVID-19 first broke out at the end of 2019, Banerjee happened to connect with Dr. Samira Mubareka (MD), a physician at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto. 

“Samira was sampling COVID-19 patients in Canada. We were on the phone, and I told her that I had done coronavirus work for my PhD. We discussed that we should culture the virus, which would help with all the diagnostics and vaccine studies,” he said.

In a matter of weeks, Banerjee was working with Mubareka’s team at Sunnybrook, trying to isolate the virus. In mid-March, the team successfully isolated and grew copies of the COVID-19 virus. 

“Now, we’re taking it a step further to study it and understand it, in order to help people make vaccines and drugs for treatment,” Banerjee said. 

“I’m based at McMaster in Hamilton, but I’m living in Toronto, Monday to Friday, to be able to work with the team. And I’m just one person; there are many other people who are commuting and staying away from their families, so they can help understand and control the outbreak.”

The work Banerjee is doing today has been an expansion on research he’s been doing for years. Originally from India, Banerjee completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Mumbai, followed by a master’s at the National Institute of Virology in India. 

“While I was doing my master’s, I went to Berlin for a summer school on infectious diseases at the Max Planck Institute. Dr. Vikram Misra (PhD) was there from WCVM at the University of Saskatchewan. Vikram had a talk on bats, which I found fascinating. The Ebola outbreak had not happened yet, but was just starting, and so all of this got me very interested in bats and viruses,” he said. 

As a result of the connection made, Banerjee moved to Saskatchewan and began studying human and bat cell responses to coronaviruses, under Misra’s supervision. 

“As part of my PhD, I looked at the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS) because I wanted to work with a virus that we think comes from bats and is a pathogen in humans,” he said. “We saw how it infects and replicates in human and bat cells, and we also saw how the human and bat cells can differentially mount an immune response against this coronavirus.” 

Banerjee also worked with Dr. Darryl Falzarano (PhD) at USask’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization – International Vaccine Centre (VIDO-InterVac), who trained him in the high containment lab so that he could conduct experiments. Falzarano also co-supervised his work on MERS coronavirus. 

In the last two years of his PhD, Banerjee began to look at next steps for his research. He reached out to Dr. Karen Mossman (PhD), who is the acting vice-president research and an immunologist at McMaster University, about the possibility of working together. 

“I knew this was a niche for myself and I wanted to continue studying bats and all of these viruses that spill over into humans,” he said. “McMaster has a unique bat colony that is maintained by researcher (Dr.) Paul Faure (PhD). So I reached out to Karen. I sent her a paper that was published from my PhD work and said, ‘Why don't you read this, and see if you find it interesting, and if you do, I’d like to get this science with me to McMaster University so I can develop it further with you.’ So she read the paper and thought it was fascinating.” 

Banerjee applied for a number of grants and fellowships to obtain funding, and was awarded the Michael G. DeGroote Fellowship Award in Basic Biomedical Science from McMaster. He also received a postdoctoral fellowship funded by NSERC. 

“My PhD was focused on virology and not as much on immunology. Now, I wanted to specialize in that. I think Karen, Vikram, Samira and I are all on the same wavelength; we’re people who get excited about interesting, fascinating science. I just love it,” he said. 

Banerjee joined Mossman’s lab in fall 2018, after defending his PhD that August. He said a lot of his experiences at USask have shaped the work he’s doing now. 

“I think the most critical thing I’d like to mention would be Vikram. From Day 1, he has trained me to go and seek out and say yes to opportunities. The other thing he also helped us do was to build our CV. It wasn’t just about publishing science, but he stressed the importance of communicating your science—go out and do presentations, talk at conferences, go to international meetings. All of this sets your CV up for success when you move on.” 

At USask, Banerjee participated in many interdisciplinary experiences, like the Life and Health Sciences Research Expo, winning the Best Basic Science Paper in 2018, and the One Health initiative. 

“I think reaching out to people in other silos was very important for me. One Health forced me to collaborate with other people, so I got to explain my science in a jargon-free and more accessible way,” he said. 

“You don’t realize all of these skill sets that you’re acquiring as you go through your PhD, but I think one of the reasons I’m able to sit with physicians and understand them is because I’ve been doing this since my PhD. There are so many soft skills that you never give a second thought.”

With the current COVID-19 pandemic, Banerjee said it’s important to stay calm and follow guidance from the government and public health officials. 

“Listen to the government, because when they’re telling you to self-isolate, there’s logic, reason, and experts behind these decisions,” he said. 

“The world can be scary and I get that. I immigrated to Canada from a different continent, and now I call Canada my home. It was all scary and it still is, and every Sunday when I drive to Toronto to stay and work with new people, it gives me a lot of anxiety. But take that opportunity, take that step and say yes. You learn a lot out of it and almost certainly, I can tell you that you’re going to gain from it.”

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Isolating and culturing SARS-CoV-2

This story was first published on March 12, 2020:

A team of researchers from Sunnybrook, McMaster University and the University of Toronto has isolated severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the agent responsible for the ongoing outbreak of COVID-19.

Thanks to nimble collaboration, the team was able to culture the virus from two clinical specimens in a Level 3 containment facility.

“We need key tools to develop solutions to this pandemic. While the immediate response is crucial, longer-term solutions come from essential research into this novel virus,” said Dr. Samira Mubareka, microbiologist and infectious diseases physician at Sunnybrook.

The isolated virus will help researchers in Canada and across the world develop better diagnostic testing, treatments and vaccines, and gain a better understanding of SARS-CoV-2 biology, evolution and clinical shedding.

“Researchers from these world-class institutions came together in a grassroots way to successfully isolate the virus in just a few short weeks,” said Dr. Rob Kozak, clinical microbiologist at Sunnybrook. “It demonstrates the amazing things that can happen when we collaborate.”

Dr. Arinjay Banerjee, NSERC post-doctoral fellow at McMaster University, said he knows the collaboration won’t stop there.

“Now that we have isolated the SARS-CoV-2 virus, we can share this with other researchers and continue this teamwork,” he said. “The more viruses that are made available in this way, the more we can learn, collaborate and share.”

Congratulations to the researchers from these three Canadian institutions: Dr. Samira Mubareka and Dr. Rob Kozak of Sunnybrook and University of Toronto; Dr. Arinjay Banerjee and Dr. Karen Mossman of McMaster University.

With gratitude to the CL3 team and Biosafety Officers.

Original source of the press release: https://sunnybrook.ca/research/media/item.asp?f=covid-19-isolated-2020&i=2069

Our peer-reviewed scientific article describing the process and the results is now out: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/9/20-1495_article

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