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Furnetics Unlimited Ltd. today notes, under the standing procedure for aggregate disclosure laid down in the Client Privacy Programme published earlier this year, that the corporation's Anatomical Congruence Programme — constituted within the Hephaestus Group at the beginning of 2016 to attend, on a client's individual application, to morphological completeness across every body system the finished design supports, including the several that the standard consultation packet does not describe — has, in the five years and eight months since opening, recorded its five-hundredth client engagement. The corporation makes no further disclosure regarding the identity of any client of the programme, the composition of any single engagement, or the several anatomical systems that the programme, on request, has been asked to consider.

What the programme is

The Anatomical Congruence Programme was constituted within the Hephaestus Group in January 2016 on a recommendation carried in the Independent Ethics Board's minute of its 2015 review of the newly-relaunched Phenotype Renovations™ pipeline. The Board's minute observed that the pipeline as re-architected under Dr. Marchetti-Roux delivered a template design of first-class fidelity, but that the standard consultation packet — the printed catalogue set before a prospective client during the intake interview — enumerated only those surfaces of the finished body that the client, or the client's mirror, would ordinarily meet. The remainder was carried under the base specification with equal care but was not itemised; the client had no occasion, during intake, to raise it.

The Congruence Programme was chartered to close that gap on request: to review, at the individual client's application, the completeness of the corporation's work across every anatomical system the chosen template supports, including the several that the standard packet does not name. The word “congruence” was chosen with care. The programme's stated object is a body that is of a piece with itself — a design in which the systems the mirror shows and the systems it does not are the same design, worked to the same standard, without residual disjuncture between what the client presents to a room and what the client carries away from it. The programme neither adds nor subtracts a template feature; it verifies that the whole animal has, in fact, been built.

The programme is not listed on the standard consultation packet. Clients arrive at it by direct enquiry, having become aware of it through the corporation's extended-consultation catalogue — issued only on request from the Office of Client Services and never circulated at intake — or through the referral of prior clients whose confidentiality trusts permit that mode of introduction. The corporation neither markets the programme nor discourages arrival at it; it has, from the beginning, taken the view that clients who wish to consider the question raise it, and that clients who do not wish to consider it should not be prompted to.

“A design is not finished at the point at which the client is content to be seen. It is finished at the point at which the client, having considered every system that carries a day of ordinary embodiment, judges the work to be of a piece with itself. The Congruence Programme exists so that the second point can be reached. It is offered to any client of the corporation who asks for it, and the corporation makes no comment, on this occasion or on any occasion, on the particular systems any particular client has asked us to consider.”

— Dr. Kenji Arai, Chief Medical Officer

What the aggregate figure records, and what it does not

The figure released today is the count of individual client engagements under the programme since its January 2016 opening, aggregated across the intervening five years and eight months. It is not a procedure count in the sense used in the corporation's annual safety disclosures; a Congruence engagement may comprise a review only, a review and a subsequent refinement, or a review and a substantive procedure, at any of the several structured-follow-up intervals the parent template supports. The figure sits alongside the base-specification totals and does not displace any part of them; nor does it disclose, in any part, the proportion of engagements that closed on the review alone.

Under the Client Privacy Programme formalised in the first quarter of the current year, an aggregate disclosure of this kind is made where three conditions obtain concurrently: the disclosure is stripped of every identifying feature at both the client and the engagement level, verified against the corporation's own re-identification tests; the release is timed so that no temporal association can be inferred between the milestone and any individual engagement contributing to it; and the release is reviewed by the Independent Ethics Board on the standing procedure for aggregate publication. The Board has recorded no objection to the present disclosure. The corporation will make no further disclosure regarding the programme, in aggregate or otherwise, until the three conditions are again concurrently satisfied.

“An aggregate disclosure of this kind is a discipline. The reason we perform it, at intervals we choose rather than at intervals the reader would prefer, is that a milestone is a fact worth recording and the fact does not require anything else to be recorded alongside it. A client of the Congruence Programme should not, on reading the corporation's notice, be able to reason from any part of it to any part of their own review. Five years and eight months is a long enough distance for the notice to be at rest.”

— Priya Ravindran, General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer

Eligibility and availability

The programme is available to any client who has received, or is contracted to receive, work under the Phenotype Renovations™ line, and to clients of the Genotype Renovations™ line at their standard structured-follow-up intervals. It is not available on either the Genetic Maintain™ or the Genetic Select™ lines, whose subject matter is not one to which the concept of morphological congruence, as the programme understands it, applies. Application is by direct enquiry to the Office of Client Services at 15 Sükhbaatar Square or, for clients within the European jurisdictional matrix, at the Brussels Client Services Office. The extended-consultation catalogue is issued to enquiring clients on receipt of the standard confidentiality undertaking and is not available in any other channel.

The programme's caseload is and remains closed to press, third-party inspection, and any characterisation attempted from outside the corporation. Enquiries from institutional partners and regulators may be directed to the Office of the General Counsel at 15 Sükhbaatar Square, Ulaanbaatar; the corporation will answer such enquiries only insofar as they concern the programme's constitution, its Board oversight, and the aggregate-disclosure framework under which the present notice has been made.

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