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Furnetics Unlimited Ltd. today announced that the corporation's Nairobi Client Services Office and the Veterinary Services Department of the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) have formalised a reciprocal training exchange under a memorandum of understanding signed at the office on the third of March. Under the memorandum, Furnetics will provide reconstructive-surgery instruction to KWS field veterinarians engaged in the clinical management of injured wild carnivores; the KWS Veterinary Services Department will, in turn, provide structured comparative wild-carnivore anatomical consultation to the Hephaestus Group.

The Nairobi Client Services Office opened in March 2019 under a jurisdictional review executed with the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI). Over the twelve months since, staff at the office and clinicians in the KWS Veterinary Services Department have exchanged case notes and technique on an informal basis, chiefly on the reconstruction of soft-tissue and skeletal injuries in large carnivores treated by KWS field teams. The memorandum signed this week places that exchange on a written footing and defines its scope, cadence, and boundaries. The KEMRI jurisdictional arrangement governing Furnetics' commercial services in Kenya is unaffected.

The exchange is educational and consultative in character. It does not extend Furnetics' commercial service offering to any new patient population and does not admit any KWS-treated animal into any Furnetics protocol.

What Furnetics provides

• Rotational reconstructive-surgery modules. KWS field veterinarians attend residential modules at the Nairobi office covering soft-tissue reconstruction of snare and gunshot injuries, plating and fixation of long-bone fractures in the large carnivore skeleton, thermal-cycle wound care, and post-operative anaesthetic recovery. Four cohorts per year are anticipated.
• Seconded instructors. Modules are led by reconstructive-surgery staff seconded from the Ulaanbaatar campus on rotating assignments, working alongside the resident clinical team at the Nairobi office. Instructors are drawn from the reconstructive practice previously led by Dr. Kenji Arai from 2013 through 2019.
• Standing case-review access. KWS clinicians may refer active reconstructive cases — on the corporation's normal confidentiality terms, and with animal identity redacted where the Service requires — for asynchronous review by the Nairobi office's clinical team, with a two working-day response window.
• Instrument and consumable donation, at cost. A defined list of reconstructive instruments and consumables used in the modules will be transferred to the Service at Furnetics' landed cost, on the understanding that the same items remain in use in KWS field practice.

What the Kenya Wildlife Service provides

• Comparative anatomical consultation. Structured consultation to the Hephaestus Group's comparative-anatomy programme drawing on KWS's field clinical experience with lion, leopard, cheetah, spotted hyena, and African wild dog. Consultation is delivered as scheduled seminars and written responses to Hephaestus enquiries, not as reciprocal secondment.
• Access to KWS post-mortem material. Under existing Kenyan wildlife-service protocols and export controls, defined post-mortem specimens made available to the Hephaestus Group for comparative anatomical study; sample scope is set case-by-case by the Service and does not include living animals or reproductive material of any kind.
• Right of review on publications. Any Hephaestus Group internal or external publication engaging KWS-derived comparative material is subject to a right of review by the Service, with a defined thirty-day comment window, prior to release.

“The clinical problems presented by an anaesthetised lioness with a proximal-femur snare injury and by an anaesthetised human client undergoing an elective reconstructive procedure have almost nothing in common at the level of indication and almost everything in common at the level of tissue mechanics. Our staff has learned a great deal from the KWS field record over the past twelve months. It is right that the exchange run in both directions and it is right that it be written down.”

— Dr. Kenji Arai, Chief Medical Officer

The Hephaestus Group's comparative-anatomy programme is one of the oldest continuous programmes within the corporation and predates the incorporation of Furnetics under its current name. Every commercial Morphic template offered under the Phenotype Renovations™ service line rests, at bottom, on a comparative anatomical foundation built up over the ten years preceding its release. Field-clinical data of the kind maintained by the KWS Veterinary Services Department — longitudinal, wound-based, and drawn from healthy adult individuals of species not held in laboratory colonies anywhere in the world — is not data the corporation can generate from any other source and is not data the Group intends to take for granted.

“The comparative-anatomy work is old work. Each of our templates rests on a comparative-anatomy foundation that had to be built up, species by species, over the ten years preceding its release. The KWS field record on the African wild dog, in particular, is data that no laboratory can generate at any expense; we are grateful for the access it grants us and we intend to be worthy of it.”

— Dr. Ines Marchetti-Roux, Chief Scientific Officer

Term and administration

The initial term of the exchange is three years from the date of signing, with rolling twelve-month module cohorts and an annual joint review of scope by the Service and the Office of the Chief Medical Officer. Either party may terminate on ninety days' written notice; obligations of confidentiality, publication review, and post-mortem-specimen handling survive termination for the balance of any active engagement.

Financial terms are simple: Furnetics bears the direct cost of the reconstructive modules delivered at Nairobi and of instructor secondment; KWS bears its own field staff time; specimen and consultation transfers are made without exchange of value between the parties beyond the at-cost consumable arrangement described above. The exchange is not a research grant, a service contract, or a sponsorship.

Ethics review

The exchange was reviewed by the corporation's Independent Ethics Board under the standing procedure for research-adjacent third-party arrangements. The Board recorded no objection and confirmed that the exchange does not admit any patient-client procedure class into contemplation and requires no supplemental oversight beyond the notification entered in its 2020 first-quarter minute.

Media enquiries may be directed to the Office of the General Counsel, 15 Sükhbaatar Square, Ulaanbaatar. Enquiries relating to the KWS side of the exchange should be directed to the Kenya Wildlife Service in the ordinary way; Furnetics will not answer such enquiries on the Service's behalf.

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