← Back to Newsroom

Furnetics Unlimited Ltd. today confirmed the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with the Forum for Laotian Economic Development, committing the corporation to open a research and development satellite campus outside Vientiane by the fourth quarter of 2029. It will be the corporation's first research site outside its Sükhbaatar Square headquarters and its fourth permanent site worldwide.

The MoU was signed at the Forum's Vientiane offices on the eleventh of June following twenty-one months of preparatory discussions co-led with the Ministry of Planning and Investment of the Lao People's Democratic Republic. The buildout will be phased over the two calendar years 2027 and 2028, with commissioning targeted for the fourth quarter of 2029.

“The corporation has, since 2010, concentrated its research capacity in a single building on Sükhbaatar Square. That concentration has served us well; it has also become a single point of failure that we no longer consider prudent to leave unaddressed. Vientiane gives the Hephaestus Group a genuine second home, in a jurisdiction whose engagement with advanced-therapy work has matured considerably over the last five years, and in a climate and time-zone band that materially widens the corporation's research day.”

— Nomin Batbayar, Chief Operating Officer

Scope of the facility

The Vientiane campus will be dedicated to research and clinical-manufacturing work under the Hephaestus Group. No clinical delivery to patient-clients is planned at the site; the corporation's clinical services will continue to be delivered from the Ulaanbaatar campus and through the Brussels and Nairobi client-services offices under the jurisdictional matrix published on the Ethics & Safety page.

• Sequencing and recombinant-vector development. A second, geographically independent copy of the Hephaestus Group's vector development pipeline, providing redundancy for the corporation's most time-sensitive research work.
• Preclinical protocol work. Bench-scale programme execution, including a portion of the ongoing Morphic Equine preclinical work announced on the seventh of July 2026.
• Manufacturing readiness. A clean-suite module built to the same EU GMP Grade A specification as the Sükhbaatar campus, initially for internal use and, from 2031, as a secondary manufacturing source for Genetic Maintain™ therapeutic products destined for the Asia-Pacific market.

Staffing and local partnerships

The corporation intends to hire approximately three hundred and twenty positions at the Vientiane site by end of 2030. Local hire will be prioritised, particularly at the junior research and technician grades; a rotation programme with the Sükhbaatar campus will run continuously from opening. Furnetics has entered into preliminary discussions with the National University of Laos concerning a joint biomedical-engineering scholarship, details of which will be announced in due course.

Legal and regulatory framework

Operations at the Vientiane site will be conducted under the Lao People's Democratic Republic's Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products framework, adopted in 2023 in close consultation with the Mongolian Ministry of Health under whose 2001 Act Furnetics has operated at Sükhbaatar Square since 2010. Standard Independent Ethics Board oversight will apply to all preclinical and manufacturing work at the site from the day of opening.

Enquiries from institutional partners and regulators may be directed to the Office of the General Counsel, 15 Sükhbaatar Square, Ulaanbaatar.

— ends —