--NOTICE OF INTENT TO SOLE SOURCE AWARD

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Office of Research and Development, National Risk Assessment Research Laboratory (NRMRL), Water Supply and Resource Division, Microbial Contaminants Control Branch, intends to award, on a sole source basis, under the authority of FAR 6.302-1, to Applied Biosystems for reagents and biological media currently used in ongoing research. The data resulting from the research will be used to help formulate health and risk guidelines for recreational water by the Office of Water and therefore must be accurate and consistent. It is critical that the data be compatible in all methods, formats, error detection and validations with the current equipment and supplies utilized in the research. The resulting sample analysis must be equivalent to analysis provided by the current equipment and reagents used in the ongoing research. Switching to reagents produced by other manufacturers would cause substantial duplication of services as work completed would need to be validated and at an additionally substantial cost. The description of the items that meet the Government?s minimum requirements are as follows: (1) taqman exogenous internal positive control reagents 5-pack, (2) taqman environmental master mix 2.0 offers accurate, real time pcr based pathogen detection in the presence of high levels of inhibitors, (3) microamp fast optical 96 well reaction plate with barcode 0.1ml, engineered to work with any fast realtime pcr systems, (4) microamp optical adhesive film, reduces the chance of well to well contamination and sample evaporation when applied to a microplate, (5) taqman universal pcr master mix, (6) custom taqman expression assays for relative quantification of RNA expression to perform RNA expression studies on any coding or non coding RNA in any organism. The North American Industry Classification Code (NAICS) is 334516. The size standard for this code is 500 employees. THIS NOTICE OF INTENT is not a request for competitive proposals. No solicitation document is available. However, interested parties may identify their interest and capability of meeting EPA requirements by submitting technical documentation to Garry A. Plear, Contract Specialist, at the office identified above, by e-mail [email protected]. The technical documentation must establish that the reagents to be provided meets all requirements. Anticipated award date will be in December 2011. Documentation must be submitted to Garry A. Plear by 3:00 PM, December 14, 2011 in order to be considered by EPA. A determination not to compete the proposed requirement based upon responses to this notice is solely within the discretion of the Government. Information received will normally be considered solely for the purpose of determining whether to conduct a competitive procurement or to proceed on a sole source basis. Point of Contact for this requirement is Garry A. Plear, Contract Specialist, at (513) 487-2054, or via e-mail at [email protected]. Questions must be submitted in writing to Mr. Garry A. Plear via e-mail. Telephone queries will not be honored.