Solicitation: 36C24E20Q0136
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.
