RESPONSESTOQUESTIONS.10.4.11.pdf

1. According to Attachment 4/Additional Technical Proposal Instructions/Section B, Mandatory Qualification Criteria/Personnel/1. Principal Investigator (page 1), the PI, preferably a PhD or MS with at least 20 years of experience, should assign to this project a minimum of 15% of the time.

According to Business Proposal Instructions/Additional Business Proposal Instructions/Estimate Effort/Suggested Labor Hours Distribution (page 48): out of 5,300 hours/year, to the Ph.D. level professional should be distributed 200 hours, which is ~3.8%. The rest of hours should be distributed to MS or below level professionals.

RESPONSE: The percentage of time designated for the Principal Investigator (PI) shall not exceed 200-300 hours per contract year. One FTE is regarded as approximately 2,000 hours per contract year. This would correspond to about 15% time allocation to the PI hours per contract year.

The two instructions are contradictory regarding the involvement of the Principal Investigator (15% versus less than 4%). In addition, the contribution of PhD chemists being limited to 4%, the bulk of work should be assigned to less qualified personnel (MS or below). In our company for example, all the synthetic chemists are at PhD level, meaning that we cannot apply for the contract. In our opinion, it would be more reasonable to set a limit for salaries rather than for qualification (e.g. only the PI can have a salary in excess of $100,000; the co-investigator should have yearly salaries below $65,000).

RESPONSE: It is expected that the PI will be of PhD-level experience. All other qualified staff may be BS, MS or PhD.

2. According to Attachment 4/Additional Technical Proposal Instructions/Supplies (page 4),direct materials, supplies, analyses, cost of packaging and distribution of materials should be estimated to $40,000 for Contract Year 01. In the previous RFP (N02-CM- 62223) this amount was estimated to $50,000. Indeed, for the synthesis of 15-25 compounds/year (Statement of Work, page 1), an average of $2,000/compound, in our experience might not be enough.

RESPONSE: $40,000 is an approximation of funds for this purpose. It is estimated per contract year that 15-25 deliverables will emerge from this RFP. The funds required for materials will depend on the amount of the final product produced and the ease of synthesis efforts.