Screening Candidate Countermeasures for Viral Hemorrhagic Fever using Liver-Based Organ-On-a-Chip Microphysiological Systems (MPS)

This Task Order will develop alternative models of human liver and vasculature, and screen novel drugs against BSL3/4 viruses that cause hemorrhagic fever. Because these microphysiological systems (MPS) models are constructed from adult primary human liver and blood vessel cell-types, they better recapitulate human liver and vascular responses of viral hemorrhagic infection and treatments and limit the reliance upon animal models. Expanding infections globally poses significant health risks to the American public as exposure to these viruses can cause major illness especially in subjects with chronic diseases. Application of these human models for viral hemorrhagic disease have the potential to better identify and screen drugs that have been under development using USG-supported grants, contracts as well as requests from the research and business community.

The impact if approval is not granted will be the capability to fulfill one of this Administration's priorities to develop and utilize novel human-based alternatives to animal models to reduce/replace animal testing against infectious disease. NIAID's role leads the way in developmental testing and screening of compounds to find therapeutics against infectious disease for Americans. Importantly, no other effort or service exists at NIH that is specifically developing human vascular-liver based MPS models to screen drugs against viral hemorrhagic fever which are not yet standard practice in drug discovery efforts and regulatory submissions.

NIAID currently have several promising therapeutics that can benefit from these models and delays in this procurement will slow their advancement in the regulatory approval pathway. Furthermore, delays will cost more as prices for goods and services are likely to increase and if these providers in our current IDIQ pool for alternative models have not received task orders to perform, it is not clear that staff will be available at the offerors' institutions to conduct the work. The cited need-by date will permit award of the new task order early in the spring of this fiscal year to reduce the lag in testing promising new therapeutics in the current pipeline.