GenBody said Wednesday it poured $430,000 into building a two-story diagnostic kit production firm dubbed PT. GenBody Indonesia Sehat in Bandung, Indonesia, to produce locally.

With the investment, Genbody will hold a 43 percent stake in the production firm. The remaining 57 percent will be owned by residents and others considering Indonesian law that caps foreign holdings to below 50 percent, the firm said.

This is an artist’s concept of GenBody’s Indonesian production firm, PT. GenBody Indonesia Sehat.

Construction on the plant is expected to finish by August with the two-story building spanning a total of 200 square meters. The firm will be comprised of various departments for production, sales, R&D, and business support.

The new production center will be able to produce up to six million rapid diagnostic kits (RDTs) annually. The plant will make diagnostic kits for a wide range of diseases, including malaria, dengue, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, and HIV.

"Indonesia has high potential as a diagnostic market, having the fourth largest population in the world,” said James Chong, CEO of GenBody. “Bandung, a large city with a population of about 2.5 million people, has about 40 hospitals and is especially evaluated as having a high demand for diagnostic products.”

“We will try to develop the market to reach 80 billion won ($75 million) in sales this year,” Chong added.

GenBody is a Korean firm that manufactures diagnostic antigen-antibody raw materials. The company is most known as the world’s first company to develop a rapid diagnostic kit for the Zika virus, in partnership with the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning’s BioNano Health Guard Research Center.

GenBody’s diagnostic kits were used to bring down the number of people identified with the Zika virus that hit Central and South America from 170,000 in 2016 to 7,000 by 2017 following signing a $58 million supply contract with Brazil, the company said.

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