Notice of Intent to Award Sole Source Project Title: Acoustic Liquid Handling System NAICS Code: 334516 Small Business: Yes Contract Type: Firm-Fixed Price Sole Source Contractor: Labcyte, Inc. Estimated Dollar Value: $592,000.00 Description of Requirement: Purchase of Acoustic Liquid Handling System Authority: 41.U.S.C. 253 (c), FAR 6.302-1 Only One Responsible Source and No Other Supplies or Services Will Satisfy Agency Requirements Notice Closing Date: 08/09/2018 by 10:00AM Eastern Time The Government hereby submits a notice of intent to award a sole source, firm fixed price purchase order. Responses to this notice must demonstrate clear and convincing evidence of technical expertise. In addition, demonstrate a clear cost and time advantage to the proposed sole source contractor. Firms that believe they are capable of performing the requirement shall submit a capability statement and supporting documents that demonstrate technical expertise, cost and time advantages. The determination not to compete this proposed contract action is solely within the discretion of the Government. Information received will normally be considered for the purpose of determining whether to conduct a competitive procurement. The Government will not be responsible for any costs incurred in response to this notice. This is NOT a request for quotes or proposals. Questions or comments to this Notice of Intent shall be directed to Eric Ward, Contracting Specialist, at
[email protected]. Email shall be the only means of communication, no responses shall be made via phone. Email Subject line should start with, "Response to Notice of Intent: 'your company name'". SYNOPSIS The U.S. EPA intends to award a sole source contract to Labcyte, Inc. under the authority of FAR 6.302-1 entitled, "Only One Responsible Source and No Other Supplies or Services Will Satisfy Agency Requirements." The purpose of this sole source is to procure an Acoustic Liquid Handling System that conforms to the specifications listed below for the EPA's National Center for Computational Toxicology (NCCT). The instrument will be used for conducting high throughput screening of thousands of chemicals in a variety of biological assays and will be housed at the NCCT laboratories located at the EPA's Research Triangle Park, NC campus. NCCT coordinates the Computational Toxicology Research Program (CompTox), which is a part of the EPA's broader Chemical Safety and Sustainability (CSS) research efforts. Chemical manufacturing and use across diverse industrial sectors is a cornerstone of the American economy. Moving toward sustainable development requires designing, producing, and using chemicals in safer ways. Information and methods are needed to make better-informed, more-timely decisions about chemicals. The EPA's CompTox program is tasked with advancing the science of toxicity testing through the development of novel, experimental, and computational approaches to rapidly characterize the biological activity, exposure potential, and potential human health risks associated with chemicals. These goals are to be achieved by incorporating advances in biotechnology, biology, chemistry, and computer sciences into a high-throughput toxicity testing paradigm. High-throughput toxicity testing (otherwise known as high-throughput screening or HTS) refers to laboratory studies that evaluate the effects of thousands of chemicals in parallel using in vitro assays (i.e. cell-based or cell-free) optimized for multi-well (96-, 384- or 1536-well) plate formats. In order to perform HTS screens, NCCT requires instrumentation capable of rapidly dispensing very small (nanoliter) volumes of fluids with high accuracy and precision. These fluids include test chemicals solubilized in dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO), water, cell culture media or other aqueous buffers as well as assay reagents and biological materials with a range of fluid characteristics. Currently, a type of acoustic dispenser known as a LabCyte Echo 550 Liquid Handler is located at NCCT laboratories. NCCT has successfully incorporated the functionality of this instrument into a majority of NCCT's HTS workflows (described below) and plans to continue leveraging acoustic dispensing capabilities as new assays and workflows are developed in the future. Acoustic dispensing technology uses precisely tuned soundwaves to dispense nanoliter volumes of liquid from source plates to destination plates. For example, in a typical workflow a 384-well source plate will contain test chemicals solubilized in DMSO. The acoustic dispenser will then be used to dispense nanoliter volumes to a destination plate containing cells in culture. The response of the cells will then be measured using other instrumentation housed at NCCT (i.e. luminescent and fluorescent plate readers, high content imaging microscope, etc.). The accuracy and precision of microfluidic transfers using acoustic dispensing technology has been shown to be markedly better than the accuracy of microfluidic transfers using contact dispensing technologies (i.e. those that use tips, probes or pins). The superior accuracy and precision of acoustic dispensing translates into less variable and therefore more reliable assay results. In addition, NCCT has developed acoustic dispensing workflows for preparation of dose plates that require serial dilution of test chemicals across a wide range of concentrations as well as workflows that involve highly accurate dispensing of nanoliter volumes of assay reagents. In both these processes, the highly accurate dispensing capabilities of the acoustic dispenser contributes to less variable and more reliable downstream assay results as compared to contact-based workflows. Yet another advantage of acoustic dispensing technology is flexibility in the location of liquid transfer from source plate to destination plate. With contact-based technologies, an HTS researcher is restricted in that the configuration of test chemicals applied to a destination plate will be the same as the configuration of test chemicals arranged in a source plate (a concept known as "stamping"). Acoustic dispensing allows the HTS researcher to easily select subsets of test chemicals from a source plate that will be applied to a destination plate (a concept known as cherry-picking) and specify location (or pattern) where those test chemicals will be applied to the destination plate. For acoustic dispensers, the cherry-picking and patterning functionality are facilitated by the precise, synchronized, automated movement of a destination plate (located above the source plate) and the acoustic transducer (located below the source plate) while the source plate remains stationary. This functionality translates into more flexible and efficient HTS workflows and is critical to HTS researchers, such as those in NCCT, that often test subsets of chemicals from a larger chemicals library. To date, NCCT has developed and implemented HTS screening workflows that leverage the cherry-picking and patterning functionalities of acoustic dispensing technologies to selectively screen subsets of chemicals from the Toxicity Forecaster (ToxCast) chemical library. The new acoustic dispenser acquired by the Agency must possess the following characteristics: - Acoustic dispenser must utilize a non-contact (i.e. tipless) dispensing technology. - Acoustic dispenser must be capable of dispensing DMSO as well as aqueous-based fluids including buffers and solubilized biological materials such as proteins and nucleic acids. - Acoustic dispenser must be able to perform an onboard survey of source plates and evaluate DMSO hydration percentage on a well-to-well basis. - Acoustic dispenser must be able to survey each well to define fluid properties for optimal dispensing of aqueous or DMSO-based solution with varying properties that may be housed on the same source plate. - Acoustic dispenser must be capable of incrementally dispensing fluid droplets down to 2.5 nL in volume at a rate of 1 µL / second. - Acoustic dispenser much be capable of dispensing fluid volumes incrementally up to and including 10,000 nL. - Acoustic dispenser must be capable of dispensing fluid volumes with a transfer accuracy of 50 µL) and low-volume (max. well volume > 12 µL). - Acoustic dispenser must be capable of dispensing fluids to ANSI-compliant 96-, 384- and 1536-well destination plate formats. - Acoustic dispenser must have independent movement of transducer and destination plate along both x- / y- axes to facilitate cherry picking and patterning functionalities. - Acoustic dispenser much come equipped with accessory devices required to support complete instrument functionality including a circulating water bath. - Acoustic dispenser must come equipped with a PC control computer and software for facilitating dose-response, plate formatting, cherry-picking and combination screening functionalities. - Acoustic dispenser must come equipped with source plate and destination plate barcodes readers. - Acoustic dispenser must use ultra-pure water as the coupling fluid. The LabCyte Echo 555 is the only instrument currently produced which incorporates all the aforementioned features. Unique Qualifications: Dispense Rate The LabCyte Echo 555 Liquid Handler has nearly identical functionality to the LabCyte Echo 550 Liquid Handler currently located in NCCT laboratories, but dispenses fluids more than 2-times faster. The purpose of this acquisition is to greatly increase the speed (i.e. throughput) and efficiency of NCCT HTS screening studies, facilitate conduct of multiple HTS screens with overlapping timelines and provide functional redundancy of laboratory capabilities. During HTS screens, NCCT staff process dozens of plates within a single workday. Using current NCCT protocols for test chemical dispensing to destination plates, the LabCyte Echo 550 can facilitate processing of approximately 8 plates per hour, or 64 plates per 8-hour work day. It is estimated that acquisition of a LabCyte Echo 555 would increase the speed of processing plates up to approximately 16 plates per hour or > 128 plates per 8-hour work day; more so, if both of the 550 and 555 instruments were operated in parallel. The Echo 555 is the fastest acoustic liquid handler available on the market. Other available acoustic dispensers report 384-well replication times that seem comparable to (but do not exceed) the Echo 555. Over the course of a single day where perhaps hundreds of plates are dispensed, this seemingly negligible difference in dispense speed aggregates to an hour or more saved each day. The increased throughput afforded by the Echo 555's superior dispensing speed means that more plates can be processed in a single day and for a large screening project, this translates in days or even weeks saved over using a slightly slower instrument. Experimental Consistency/Standard Operating Procedures The acquisition of LabCyte Echo 555 is critical for ensuring continuity with ongoing NCCT laboratory projects as well as comparability of data from previous HTS screens with future HTS screens conducted by NCCT. Acquisition of an Echo 555 would facilitate seamless transfers and interchangeability of research protocols, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and R code used to automate experimental design that have been developed by NCCT labs around the LabCyte Echo platform. Acquisition of a different type of acoustic dispenser would prohibit comparability of past and future screening results and necessitate the need to redraft and re-optimize existing research protocols and SOPs and develop entirely new streams of R code to automate experimental design. Acquisition of a new screening-speed acoustic dispenser manufactured by another vendor would have the effect of either bifurcating NCCT lab operations into "Echo-only" and "Vendor X-only" projects or relegating all pilot and development work to the new screening-speed acoustic dispenser since HTS would be the ultimate experimental aim, rendering the current Echo 550 obsolete. Duplication of Effort The LabCyte Echo 550 currently located in NCCT labs requires specific types of certified 96-well and 384-well source plates for operation. Research protocols within NCCT have been developed using these Echo-certified source plates. The LabCyte Echo 555 (the subject of this justification) uses the same source plates. Therefore, existing research protocols are transferrable across the two instruments. Acquisition of a different type of acoustic dispenser would necessitate redrafting and optimization of existing research protocols or potentially switching to a different type of source plate consumable. Both circumstances would disrupt continuity of experimentation and limit comparability of data generated across the respective instruments. Also, NCCT has worked with our chemical management contractor to generate pre-plated chemical libraries on Echo source plates due to our current use of the Echo 550. The NCCT chemical libraries list ~4,500 unique chemicals, solubilized in DMSO and represent millions of dollars of investment over the past 10+ years. A significant number of these chemical stock solution have been exhausted requiring new procurement of neat compound in some cases, and new DMSO solutions in others. The chemical libraries pre-plated on Echo consumables are irreplaceable and necessary to prolong the series of experiments that could be conducted using the original chemical stocks that were also used to generate all ToxCast data to date. On-board DMSO Hydration Evaluation DMSO used to solubilize ToxCast chemicals for HTS applications, is known to be hygroscopic (absorbs water vapor/humidity from the ambient atmosphere). Hydration of DMSO can lead to degradation of test compounds that are sensitive to hydrolysis. Excessive DMSO hydration can also affect the accuracy and precision of acoustic dispensing. Labcyte is the only vendor that offers onboard DMSO hydration analysis and reports to the user those wells with excessive DMSO hydration that adversely impact dispensing. Other types of acoustic dispensers offer "side-car" instruments to measure DMSO hydration off-board which require extra time spent measuring each plate, but also extra bench space, software, etc. Combination Screening NCCT plans to conduct experiments that require synthesizing complex mixtures of chemicals where the concentration of one or more constituents varies in comparison to other constituents in the mixture (a technique known as combination screening). Acoustic dispensing is the tool that will be used to facilitate precise, automated preparation of these mixtures in small (nanoliter) amounts. The LabCyte Echo 555 is equipped with software that facilitates planning and conduct of combination screens. Other types of acoustic dispensers do not currently offer this functionality. Labcyte is currently the only contractor able to supply the equipment with ability to perform this work at the standards EPA needs. Labcyte is the sole distributer of the Echo 555. No other contractor can complete this work. This will result in a firm-fixed price contract. The period of performance will last one year from date of award. We anticipate issuing a solicitation on or about Aug 27, 2018. The acquisition of these commercial services will be processed in accordance with FAR Part 13. The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code is 334516 Analytical laboratory instrument manufacturing. Interested firms may identify their interest and capability to respond to the requirement. THIS NOTICE OF INTENT IS NOT A REQUEST FOR COMPETITIVE QUOTATIONS. A determination by the Government not to compete this acquisition based upon responses to this notice is solely within the discretion of the Government. Sources wishing to be considered MUST submit documentation to the office identified in this notice. Documentation must be submitted within 6 calendar days of the date of publication of this notice. Submit your capability statement in writing to Eric Ward via email at
[email protected]. Telephone requests will not be honored.