Notice of Intent to award sole source contract. This is not a solicitation. The Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, West Haven, Connecticut (NCO 1 Contracting 90C) intends to negotiate and award a purchase order for laboratory instrumentation and related software know as a dynamic clamp system to Cambridge Electronic Design, Limited, Science Park, Milton Road, Cambridge, England CB4 OFE. The authority for this action is 41 USC 253(c)(1) as implemented by FAR 6.302-1 Only one responsible source and no other supplies or services will satisfy agency requirements. This notice contains information current through FAC 2005-55. The NAICS is 423440. The PSC is AN15. No solicitation will be posted to this site. Interested persons may contact the Contract Specialist regarding this procurement and may identify capabilities for items of this kind. Contract Specialist: Cheri K. Wicks,
[email protected]. Email only, no phone calls accepted. A decision not to compete this requirement is based upon this notice, the responses to this notice and the Justification and Approval. All contractors are required to be registered in the Central Contractor Registry (www.ccr.gov). Contractors should complete On-Line Representations and Certifications (https://orca.bpn.gov/). Consult your State Procurement Technical Assistance Center (PTAC) for technical assistance with these requirements. The salient characteristics are as follows: Dynamic-clamp system should be compatible with the patch-clamp amplifier in Dr. Waxman's laboratory with no special hardware required. Should be able to apply Hodgkin/Huxley (standard or Alpha/Beta), single exponential, exponential difference, Chemical synapse, Electrical synapse and Leak models. Should be able to execute multiple (up to 8 models) to generate outputs on multiple (up to 8 DACs); multiple models driving one DAC are automatically summed. It has been shown by simulations and experiment that the performance of dynamic clamp systems is strongly affected by the update rate and latency of updates. The high speed methods are important to provide extremely high rates of update with low latencies, to allow undertake experiments. The mechanism must incorporate a hardware based overflow detector so that one can be sure that the required update rates have been achieved and that your data is trustworthy. Thus dynamic clamp should have fast update rates: 100 kHz with one Hodgkin/Huxley model, 60 kHz with 4 models and 30 kHz with 15 models. Dynamic clamp should have detection of overload in hardware to give confidence in results. Also the system should have: ergonomic dialogs make to easy view and edit the model parameters with ability to modify model parameters and apply changes while sampling; automatic switching between multiple parameter states during sampling; pulse and waveform outputs defined by the user can be summed into the outputs generated by dynamic clamping; output sequencer can enable and disable individual models dynamically during a single sampling sweep.