Bioinformatics Resource Centers for Infectious Diseases
Introduction The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH), of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) supports research related to the basic understanding of microbiology and immunology leading to the development of vaccines, therapeutics, and medical diagnostics for the prevention, treatment, and diagnosis of infectious and immune-mediated diseases. The NIAID, Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (DMID) has a requirement to maintain Bioinformatics Resource Centers (BRCs), which have become a critical resource for data and tools generated by NIAID supported programs and other publicly accessible data for the infectious disease research community. Description NIAID has made a significant investment in funding basic and clinical research projects that are generating large, diverse and complex data sets including genomics/omics data, clinical data, immune phenotyping assay data, imaging and other data sets. The infectious diseases and immune mediated diseases communities have become a data-intense enterprise and a priority for NIAID is to transform this data into knowledge to understand the pathogenesis, transmission, evolution of the pathogen, pathogen-host interactions and the host response to infectious diseases and inform the development of new and improved diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines. NIAID has invested in bioinformatics and data science for data generated by NIAID intramural and extramural communities and has expanded its activities in data management systems, bioinformatics resource centers and data repositories/knowledgebases that have provided the broad scientific community with user friendly access to open data and analytical tools. Since their inception in 2004, NIAID's BRCs have focused on supporting and providing genome sequence databases and annotation of microbial organisms. These BRCs have provided the infectious disease research community with publicly accessible systems that store, update, integrate and display genome sequence data and its annotation, functional genomics and other "omics" data, and other associated data and information for a large variety of human pathogens and vectors of human pathogens and related microbial species and strains. The BRC systems allow users to query and analyze this data. As a result, the BRCs have become the public repository and primary resource for data and tools generated by NIAID supported programs and other publicly accessible data for the infectious disease research community. The objective of this solicitation is to continue support for the BRCs to provide data-driven, production-level sustainable computational platform(s) that enable sharing and access to usable and re-usable data, portable computational tools and standards that support interoperability for the infectious diseases research community. Through this effort NIAID will continue to provide bioinformatics services and training to support large-scale, system level diverse data integration and modeling, and enable predictive biology for pathogens and host-pathogen interactions that will accelerate discovery research, clinical investigation, and therapeutic development for infectious diseases. In addition, the platform infrastructure is expected to serve as a model for future NIAID systems. A change from the previous competition should be noted: up to two (2) BRCs will be awarded with one (1) contract awarded for bacterial species and viral families and one (1) contract awarded for protozoan species, fungi and invertebrate vectors of human pathogens. Offerors may propose to one or both data resources for the group of organisms. Funding under the prior solicitation is NOT required for submission to this solicitation. It is anticipated that two (2) cost-reimbursement plus fixed-fee, level-of-effort, type contracts will be awarded with a one-year base period of performance beginning on or around September 1, 2019. Awards are expected to include four (4) one-year option periods. The total period of performance, including options, is five (5) years. The Government's base level-of-effort requirement is estimated at 43,680 direct labor hours for each contract period, equating to 21 Full Time Equivalents (FTEs) with an FTE being defined as 2,080 direct labor hours. In addition to the base level-of-effort, each contract period shall contain an option quantity for up to nine (9) additional FTEs. The NIAID recognizes that a single organization or institution may not have the full spectrum of expertise or facilities required to perform all activities set forth in the Statement of Work. Contractors may need to be supported to a certain extent by the expertise and resources of other organizations or persons through consortia agreements, partnerships, subcontracts, and/or consultants. However, contractors shall be responsible for ALL work performed and shall be responsible for project planning, initiation, implementation, management and communication; evaluation, selection, and management of subcontractors; and for all deliverables specified in this contract. Any responsible Offeror may submit a proposal which will be considered by the Agency. This Request for Proposal (RFP) will be available electronically on/about October 10, 2018 and may be accessed through FedBizOpps http://www.fbo.gov/. This notice does not commit the Government to award a contract. No collect calls will be accepted. No facsimile transmissions will be accepted. For this solicitation, the NIAID requires proposals to be submitted via two (2) methods: (1) Disc (CD or DVD) and (2) Online via the NIAID electronic Contract Proposal Submission (eCPS) website. The content of the disc and online proposals must be indentical. Submission of proposals by facsimile or e-mail is not acceptable. For directions on using eCPS, go to the website https://ecps.nih.gov and then click on "How to Submit.".
RFP-NIAID-DMID-NIHAI201800005 Department of Health and Human Services National Institutes of Health National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
9/25/18, 11:04 AM