Definitive Contract 75N95026C00007

The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has awarded a definitive cost-plus-no-fee contract valued at $30.3M to the University of Maryland, Baltimore to establish and operate the NIH NeuroBioBank Brain and Tissue Repository (NBB), a collection site that will acquire, process, store, curate, preserve, and distribute central nervous system (CNS) and related tissue samples for neurological, psychiatric, and neurodevelopmental disorder research. The contract, which carries no set-aside designation and runs through October 31, 2030, supports the coordinated efforts of multiple NIH institutes—including the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke, and National Institute on Aging—to increase the availability of post-mortem human brain tissue for research purposes. UMB must acquire brain tissue from deceased donors across diverse populations and age ranges, including individuals with various neurological conditions as well as controls with no known brain disorders, while maintaining detailed inventory documentation through the NIH NeuroBioBank Portal.

Under this five-year performance period, UMB is expected to demonstrate capability to acquire at least 70 donors annually, with potential to process up to 150 unique human donors per year, resulting in projected totals of 350 to 1,000 donors by contract completion. As a leading academic health sciences institution with substantial experience managing federal biomedical research contracts and grants, UMB will ensure demographic diversity in donor populations across race, ethnicity, and age while participating in tissue-sharing activities governed by NIH NeuroBioBank guidelines. This award represents part of a larger multiple-award strategy by NIH to establish sufficient collection site capacity for supporting neuroscience research across the federal research portfolio.