Intent to sole source: data annotation, curation & mapping

Page 1 of 1 The Department of Veterans Affairs, Boston VA Health Care System, intends to negotiate on a sole source basis, pursuant to FAR 6.302-1, with BOOZ ALLEN HAMILTON INC for scientific expertise including but not limited to data annotation, curation and mapping services, and statistical genetics. The Veterans Health Administration Office of Research and Development (ORD) runs the Million Veteran Program (MVP), which is national federal intiative and requires the scientific service of data annotation, mapping and curation service to make genomic data research ready as well as well as statistical and bioinformatics services to help with analysis and trouble shoot the genomic analysis tools in the High Performance Computing environment at scale. MVP has currently processed over 800,000 sample data and released curated data set of more than 460,000 sample. The processing of the of the remaining samples are well underway with the workflows, pipelines, and analytical methods developed over the last three years. Also MVP is to continue to recruit the second million participants to build the largest genomic data bank to date anywhere in the word. Services include expert statistical analysis, data cleaning and curation methods and pipelines, data mapping processes at scale, and bioinformatics analysis at scale for MVP. This is a follow-on contract as the vendor has been providing the required services to the VA to formalize numerous methods, pipelines and data structure to meet the governments requirements at scale. Also, with about half of the samples already processed and the processing of the remaining half well underway, a change of vendor will cause a very substantial duplication of cost to ramp up a different set of individual and different or even slightly different skill sets. The vendor has worked with the government over the contract period to QA/QC the data and provide research ready data for analysis to the research teams. They have also assisted in providing research support to answer data and QA/QC process related questions from the researchers. The high quality of the MVP data had resulted in over 70 publications in prestigious national and international journals. There is an acute requirement to continue this service without interruptions. Any changes in the methods or personnel may result in errors that can be easily amplified at the very large-scale MVP is working with and which may result in serious cost overruns, delays or both. This is a notice of intent is not a request for competitive proposals; however, any responsible source who believes it is capable of meeting the requirement may submit a capability statement to the contracting office no later than Wednesday, May 11th, 5:00 PM, EST. Interest/capability statements may be sent to Lynn Portman at lynn.portman@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.