Kingfisher produces quality animal reagents to help advance investigators in veterinary and/or human research. Products include: recombinant proteins, antibodies, and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs). Our CEO, Joanna Labresh, began this company to provide a variety of animal species reagents while also ensuring that they were specific to said species. Educated from a veterinary background and building her company's foundation on this, our CEO wanted to have a business that could cater to all forms of animal research.

An issue she found amongst researchers was that they felt limited to constructing their work around models such as rat or mice because everybody uses rats and mice. Products for these animal reagents are readily available, yet two models cannot always represent systems occurring in the human body or whichever form one wishes to study. And that is why Kingfisher produces a vast array of different animal reagents. To name a few, we carry; Atlantic salmon, dolphin, ferret, caprine, zebrafish, and so on!

There are scientists that are responsible for making antibodies and ELISA’s, but I was placed with those that worked on making proteins. We carry proteins that help catalyze many immune responses such as chemokines, cytokines, and growth factors. You think of our protein production system as organized into three parts; Design, Expression, and Purification. I interned in the protein purification department.

To check whether or not we have cleaned the protein, we perform protein gel electrophoresis and check if the molecular weight of the protein matches. If we’re successful, the protein gets lyophilized, or freeze-dried and sent out for shipping!

There are many ways in which the biomedical sciences and their treatments take public health measures some steps back. When we consider cost, practicality, and much more, time and time again, we’ve seen they can be quite unhelpful. But when it comes to advancing research and understanding many of the zoonotic derived pathogens that affect the greater populations, it’s extremely valuable for researchers to carry out their experiments with the right products. This is where biotechnology comes to play. There must be a diversity of animal models to choose from when carrying out experiments to understand some of the mechanisms these pathogens take to attack our immune system.

For instance, we now know that COVID-19 can cause this “cytokine storm” in that these inflammatory mediators decide to kick up their steam to fight the infection. Your dendritic cells and macrophages help present COVID-19 antigen to trigger an immune response. However, a trend we see amongst patients with a hyperactive immune response is mortality and high ICU occupancy. This is an unregulated hyperinflammatory response where high levels of cytokines such as GM-CSFs, INF gammas, TNF alphas are present (Bhaskar et al. 2020). And those that experience this suffer vascular damage, metabolic and endothelial dysfunctional, and thus causing a cascade of multiple organ system failures. Studying dysregulated cytokine production can provide further insight on immuno-pathogenesis but also suggest what sort of therapeutic strategies to implement on patients who suffer from a more intense COVID-19 experience.

Some researchers have come to find that ferrets are excellent animal models for testing this and in the past two years, we've seen an influx of researchers requesting our ferret cytokines. Working at Kingfisher during the pandemic, and seeing how COVID-19 was this big mystery and not that well understood, I’ve come to recognize that the work that I was doing was of help. Although I was not involved in day-to-day human interactions, I helped provide the right products for researchers to discover more information about this pathogen. And by having a greater understanding, then we’ll know what are the next best steps. Before, I used to see biotechnology and healthcare as two separate brackets in this realm of medicine, but I now see them as two working forces that are dynamic in improving many of the challenges we see for our health.

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