NIH Cancer Trials Support Unit (CTSU)

The National Institutes of Health established this Master IDIQ on August 31, 2013, to provide operational, administrative, regulatory, and logistical support services to National Cancer Institute multi-center coordinating centers and participating trial sites. The vehicle's ordering period closed on August 30, 2020—ordering is no longer active and has been closed for nearly six years.

The combined potential value across all ten task orders is $241.4 million, with $226.3 million obligated (94% of combined potential). The vehicle is dominated by a single contractor: Westat, Inc. holds seven of ten orders worth $225.2 million in combined potential value, while PPD Development LP holds three orders worth $16.1 million. All task orders are competitively unrestricted with no set-aside designations. The sole customer across all awards is the National Cancer Institute.

Task orders span operational support, core services, data system hosting and maintenance, special initiative project management, and audit coordination. The largest order is a core support services contract to Westat awarded August 31, 2013, with a ceiling value of $164.5 million and an obligated amount of $151.6 million; this order extended through August 30, 2020. A subsequent core support services order to Westat, awarded August 31, 2020, carried a ceiling value of $45.5 million and an obligated amount of $43.3 million, with performance ending August 31, 2022. Remaining orders range from roughly $0.3 million to $16 million. All task orders use cost-plus-fixed-fee pricing. Activity was concentrated in the 2014–2016 period (six of ten orders), with one order in 2019 and two in 2020.

Since the vehicle's ordering period expired in 2020 and no successor vehicle is identified in the source, pursuit is not viable.

The NCI is one of the world's largest public sponsors of clinical trials in cancer, supporting a broad range of prevention, diagnostic, imaging, and treatment studies of new drugs, procedures and multi-modality approaches for oncology patients. Developmental work for new treatments has traditionally been carried out in a limited number of institutions while definitive studies comparing new treatments to the standard of care have required multi-center collaborations. The NCI, through its Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program (CTEP), Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis (DCTD) and other Divisions/Programs supports multiple sites and investigators in North America to collaborate in multi-center trials/studies. These NCI multi-center programs each maintain the necessary infrastructure needed to successfully perform clinical trials/studies.The CTSU provides a wide-variety of operational, administrative, regulatory, and logistical support services to NCI multi-center coordinating centers and participating sites.