Bioinformatics Resource Centers for Infectious Diseases

Introduction This is a Small Business Sources Sought notice. This is NOT a solicitation for proposals, proposal abstracts, or quotations. The purpose of this notice is to obtain information regarding: (1) the availability and capability of qualified small business sources; (2) whether they are small businesses; HUBZone small businesses; service-disabled, veteran-owned small businesses; 8(a) small businesses; veteran-owned small businesses; woman-owned small businesses; or small disadvantaged businesses; and (3) their size classification relative to the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code for the proposed acquisition. Your responses to the information requested will assist the Government in determining the appropriate acquisition method, including whether a set-aside is possible. An organization that is not considered a small business under the applicable NAICS code should not submit a response to this notice. Background The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH), of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) supports research related to the basic understanding of microbiology and immunology leading to the development of vaccines, therapeutics, and medical diagnostics for the prevention, treatment, and diagnosis of infectious and immune-mediated diseases. NIAID has made a significant investment in funding basic and clinical research projects that are generating large, diverse and complex data sets including genomics/omics data, clinical data, immune phenotyping assay data, imaging and other data sets. The infectious disease and immune mediated disease communities have become a data-intense enterprise and a priority for NIAID is to transform this data into knowledge to understand the pathogenesis, transmission, evolution of the pathogen, pathogen-host interactions and the host response to infectious diseases and inform the development of new and improved diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines. NIAID has invested in bioinformatics and data science for data generated by NIAID intramural and extramural communities and has expanded its activities in data management systems, bioinformatics resource centers and data repositories that have provided the broad scientific community with user friendly interfaces for public access to data and analytic tools. Purpose and Objectives Since their inception in 2004, NIAID's Bioinformatics Resource Centers (BRCs) have focused on supporting and providing genome sequence databases and annotation of microbial organisms. These BRCs have provided the infectious disease research community with publicly accessible systems that store, update, integrate and display genome sequence data and its annotation, functional genomics and other "omics" data, and other associated data and information for a large variety of human pathogens and vectors of human pathogens and related microbial species and strains. The BRC systems allow users to query and analyze this data. As a result, the BRCs have become the public repository and primary resource for data and tools generated by NIAID supported programs and other publicly accessible data for the infectious disease research community. The NIAID, Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (DMID) has a requirement to maintain BRCs, which have become a critical resource for data and tools generated by NIAID supported programs and other public data for the infectious disease research community. The scope of this anticipated solicitation is to provide bioinformatics resources and services for the infectious disease community. Project Requirements The proposed BRCs will provide the following: - Data-driven production-level sustainable computational platform(s) that enable sharing and access to usable data, portable computational tools, and standards that support interoperability. - Expertise in infectious diseases with bioinformatics services and training to support large-scale, system level diverse data integration and modeling, to support predictive biology for pathogens and host-pathogen interactions that will accelerate discovery research, clinical investigation, and therapeutic development for infectious diseases. - A bioinformatics platform that is expected to serve as a model for future NIAID systems. Two centers are planned, one for bacterial species and viral families and one for protozoan species, fungi and invertebrate vectors of human pathogens. Offerors may propose to one or both data resources for the group of organisms. Anticipated Period of Performance It is anticipated that two (2) cost-reimbursement, level-of-effort, type contracts will be awarded with a one-year base period of performance beginning on or around June 1, 2019. Awards are expected to include four (4) one-year option periods. Total anticipated period of performance, if all term-options are exercised, shall be June 1, 2019 to May 31, 2024. The Government's base level-of-effort requirement is estimated at 43,680 direct labor hours for each contract year, equating to 21 full time equivalents (FTE's) with an FTE being defined as 2,080 direct labor hours. In addition to the base level-of-effort, each year of performance is anticipated to contain an option quantity for up to nine (9) additional FTEs. Other Important Considerations - The systems developed must be in compliance with federal information security management requirements - moderate - FedRAMP compliant Capability Statement/Information Sought: Sources are expected to have the expertise, personnel, and facilities to meet the requirements of this project. Tailored Capability Statements submitted in response to this announcement should demonstrate the offerors' qualifications and experience, specifically providing evidence as to their capability to perform this requirement, with particular attention to the following technical areas: - The ability to provide a bioinformatics platform for the integration and access of multi-scale infectious disease data co-located with computational tools. - The ability and expertise to support the selected group of organisms and associated data - integrated -omic, clinical and epidemiological data, and other data-types as well as associated metadata, across multiple levels of biological understanding from molecule, cell, organism, and population; and across pathogen, vector, and host to bring together many facets of infectious diseases including pathogen, host, clinical phenotype, and diseases information, and to enable multi-scale systems level investigations. - The ability to provide analysis capabilities, including software tools and computational algorithms to analyze, visualize, and interpret all supported data types. Allow users to analyze their own data. - The ability to support interoperability of data and tools among systems developed by NIAID programs and research initiatives funded by the NIH or other funding agencies and institutions. Identify opportunities for collaboration with programs supporting development of open data-sharing repositories and knowledgebases. - The ability to provide access to the data and analysis resources to serve both the sophisticated users as well as less-expert users via user-friendly graphical user interfaces and application programming interfaces, including web services, workspaces, and/or other data transfer capabilities. - The ability to provide hands-on training and bioinformatics services as well and adopt innovative approaches to engage the infectious disease research community to contribute content. How to Submit a Response: Page Limitations: Interested qualified small business organizations should submit a tailored capability statement for this requirement not to exceed five (5) pages, excluding resumes. Capability Statements must not include links to internet web site addresses (URLs) or otherwise direct readers to alternate sources of information. Font size must be 10 to 12 points. Spacing must be no more than 15 characters per inch. Within a vertical inch, there must be no more than six lines of text. Print margins must be at least one-inch on each edge of the paper. Print setup should be single-sided on standard letter size paper (8.5 x 11" in the U.S., A4 in Europe). All proprietary information should be marked as such. Required Business Information: - DUNS - Company Name. - Company Address. - Company Point of Contact, Phone and Email address - Current GSA Schedules and/or Government-wide Acquisition Contracts (GWACs) appropriate to this Sources Sought. - Do you have a Government approved accounting system? If so, please identify the agency that approved the system. - Type of Company (i.e., small business, 8(a), woman owned, veteran owned, etc.) as validated via the System for Award Management (SAM) located https://www.sam.gov/index.html/#1. This indication should be clearly marked on the first page of your Capability Statement (preferably placed under the eligible small business concern's name and address). Number of Copies: Please submit one (1) electric copy of your response as follows: All capability Statement sent in response to this SMALL BUSINESS SOURCES SOUGHT notice must be submitted electronically (via e-mail) to Brian Madgey, Contracting Officer, at madgeyba@mail.nih.gov. in MS Word or Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). The e-mail subject line must specify HHS-NIH-NIAID-SBSS-DMID-NIHAI201800005. Facsimile responses will not be accepted. Common Cut-off Date: Electronically submitted tailored capability statements are due no later than 3:00 PM (Eastern Prevailing Time) on 12/06/2017. CAPABILITY STATEMENTS RECEIVED AFTER THIS DATE AND TIME WILL NOT BE CONSIDERED. Disclaimer and Important Notes This notice does not obligate the Government to award a contract or otherwise pay for the information provided in response. The Government reserves the right to use information provided by respondents for any purpose deemed necessary and legally appropriate. Any organization responding to this notice should ensure that its response is complete and sufficiently detailed to allow the Government to determine the organization's qualifications to perform the work. Respondents are advised that the Government is under no obligation to acknowledge receipt of the information received or provide feedback to respondents with respect to any information submitted. After a review of the responses received, a pre-solicitation synopsis and solicitation may be published in Federal Business Opportunities. However, responses to this notice will not be considered adequate responses to a solicitation. Confidentiality No proprietary, classified, confidential, or sensitive information should be included in your response. The Government reserves the right to use any non-proprietary technical information in any resultant solicitation(s).