NEW YORK – The National Institutes of Health's National Cancer Institute has awarded a contract for genomic services worth up to $150 million in total over five years to six entities.
The Genomic Characterization Center (GCC) awards, made in January to support NCI's Center for Cancer Genomics (CCG), were made under a so-called "Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity" (IDIQ) contract, where the exact quantities and delivery times of services are unknown at the time of the award. NCI guarantees a minimum order of $2,000, with a maximum ceiling of $150 million.
Contractors are Sampled (formerly Infinity Biologix), the University of Southern California, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the New York Genome Center, Washington University in St. Louis, and SeqMatic.
According to the NCI's request for proposals, the contract seeks services including whole-exome sequencing, whole-genome sequencing, deep sequencing for targeted validation, DNA methylation analysis, RNA analysis, single-cell sequencing, and spatial sequencing, all aimed at acquiring cancer genomics data for NCI projects.
Applicants could submit proposals for four different "pools" of work: high-throughput DNA sequencing, high-throughput RNA sequencing, epigenomic analysis by sequencing or array-based assays, and single-cell/spatial characterization.
"Sampled's selection for this contract is a significant milestone in our mission to support cancer researchers with cutting-edge multiomics tools," Sampled CSO Shareef Nahas said in a statement. "This partnership with the NCI allows us to contribute directly to advancing oncology research, accelerating the discovery of novel cancer therapies, and improving patient outcomes through comprehensive genomic and molecular insights."
NCI established the CCG in 2010 in order to catalog genomic alterations in human tumors, with the aim of improving the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. The GCCs are supposed to "provide a centralized approach to conducting molecular profiling on the same cancer tissue" to achieve "optimal data integration and data comparability," according to the request for proposals.