36C24E24Q0124.docx

Special Notice Special Notice

GENERAL INFORMATION

Regional Procurement Office East Building 32 Suite 1A1111 1010 Delafield Road Pittsburgh PA 15215-1802

POINT OF CONTACT*

Contracting Officer Michael Haydo michael.haydo@va.gov

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

AGENCY’S URL

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AGENCY CONTACT’S EMAIL ADDRESS

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DESCRIPTION

The Veteran’s Administration (VA) Office of Research and Development, Regional Procurement Office – East in Pittsburgh, PA intends to negotiate on a sole source basis with Lab2Market based in Dana Point, CA on behalf of the VA Cleveland Healthcare System.

The requirement is to provide research assistance for planned VA medical studies. The Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center Research Service plans a Translation Education and Mentoring Center by BLR&D Service. This Center will work with health translation researchers nationwide to educate and mentor in the process for translation. The Coulter process and NIH’s translational process both use C3i which is maintained and delivered by Lab2Market. Lab2Market has offered the VA-TEAM Center full access to the educational materials. These materials are already fully prepared, vetted, and proven. Dr. Elias Caro, President of Lab2Market, has made these materials available to VA-TEAM at no charge. This partnership is a critical component that will allow the Center to deliver a fully capable set of online content backed by existing IT infrastructure and a lineage of proven results, at a substantial cost savings to this program.

Specific Tasks.

1) Establish a national translational education center for VA funded investigators using a pressure-tested, gold standard approach to training researchers in healthcare in the process of moving research to the market to impact clinical care.

2) Yearly, deliver active mentoring and project management to select projects nationally that show high potential in shifting from “promising research” to “licensable intellectual property.”

3) Demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach by measuring key translational metrics and measures to indicate the general knowledge of translational research issues within the VA research community.

Task 1 - Enterprise Management Controls.

Subtask 1 - Integration Management Control Planning. Provide the technical and functional activities at the required level for integration of all tasks specified within this SOW. Include productivity and management methods such as quality assurance, progress/status reporting and program reviews. Provide the centralized administrative, clerical, documentation and related functions.

Subtask 2 - Contract Management. Prepare a Contract Management Plan describing the technical approach, organizational resources and management controls to be employed to meet the cost, performance and schedule requirements throughout Contract execution. Provide a monthly status report monitoring the quality assurance, progress/status reporting and program reviews applied to this contract.

Deliverables: Contract Management Plan Annual Status Report

Performance Monitoring

Increase in metrics typically tracked by VA TTP and we will work with that program to track the following measures: number of invention disclosures, patents filed, patents awarded, licenses completed, license yield (licenses per patent), and follow-on funding procured. To measure this, we will track not just the total commercialization metrics, but also the progression of each awarded project through these phases marked by the concept of “Technology Readiness Levels” or TRLs (See appendix 3). Deliverables of this will include timing of project progression, the percentage of projects that progress from an invention disclosure filing to any given stage, and the number of investigators who file new invention disclosures at any time following participation in the VA-TEAM center programming. Finally, another metric of this progression will be the amount of follow-on funding from translation-specific mechanisms, including funding from VHA Innovation Ecosystem, SBIR, STTR or other similar mechanisms.

The requirement will take place at a VA facility in Cleveland, OH. The sole source is pursuant to FAR 6.302-1 Only One Responsible Source and No Other Supplies or Services Will Satisfy Agency Requirements. This notice of intent is not a request for competitive proposals, however; any responsible source who shows it is capable of meeting the requirement may submit a capability statement and supporting documentation to the contracting office no later than Wednesday, Sept 11, 2024, (10:00 AM, EST). Interest/capability statements may be sent to Michael Haydo at Michael.haydo@va.gov. No telephone responses will be accepted. A determination not to compete the proposed requirement based upon the responses to this notice is solely within the discretion of the Government.

Special Notice