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NOTICE OF INTENT TO AWARD A SOLE SOURCE PURCHASE ORDER
Annual license fee and maintenance for ACD/Labs Software.
Title of Procurement: License and Maintenance for a Suite of related ACD software products, including ACD/Name-to-Structure Batch, ChemWorkbook (Stand-Alone and Floating licenses), ACD/Name Stand-Alone, and ACD Name Batch.
In accordance with FAR 13.106-1(b)(1), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Office of Research and Development (ORD), intends to award a sole source purchase order for License and Maintenance for ACD/Labs software products, including ACD/Name-to-Structure Batch, ChemWorkbook (Stand-Alone and Floating licenses), ACD/Name Stand-Alone, and ACD Name Batch in support of ORD's National Center for Toxicology (NCCT) Toxcast program. The contract will have a base period of twelve months and two-twelve month option periods each for a total potential contract period of performance of thirty-six months.
NCCT has an innovative research program that includes the generation of high-throughput screening (HTS) data for thousands of chemicals in the ToxCast and Tox21 projects, and the development and dissemination of high quality searchable, chemical databases for use in building read-across arguments and toxicity prediction models based on these and other data. The suite of software products included in this procurement span a set of capabilities that enable handling and processing of chemical structures and associated data with unique, integrated functionality that supports high quality structure curation tasks. This includes the ability to import, view, search, augment, and merge chemical structure files (SDF files), detect chemical tautomers and structure duplicates, process and export a chemical database in a variety of formats (SMILES, sdf, desalted), handle absolute and relative stereochemistry, and access the proprietary ACD Dictionary of 31K highly curated chemical structures, with over 170K systematic, trivial and trade names. Chemical names are the most commonly used, but also the most problematic means of locating chemical information due to their many, varied equivalent representations. The ability to generate chemical structures from chemical names (trivial, common, and systematic) is an essential capability for NCCT's public-facing web- services that will provide the ability to locate DSSTox chemical structure records. Systematic chemical name generation from structure is also an essential capability to incorporate into a chemical name-structure-searching tool in order facilitate name-structure matching, as well as to parse chemical names into useful subgroup-elements for name-searching, such as in: azo, nitrile, biphenyl, triazole, etc. The DSSTox project has relied upon the ACD Name Stand-Alone software to support its high quality curation efforts for over a decade. However, that software license is limited to the processing of a single name-structure or structure-name conversion at a time. NCCT's DSSTox project has expanded to include over 700K chemical substances. The ACD Name-to-Structure and Name/Batch software will enable the batch conversion of hundreds of thousands of DSSTox structures to both IUPAC and Chemical Abstract Services (CAS) systematic names (used across EPA regulatory documents), according to strict naming conventions in both cases. In addition, the license will permit redistribution of these generated names through NCCT public web-services and tools. ACD/Name products contain proprietary, patented technology for name/structure conversions and have unique advanced capabilities to handle challenging areas of nomenclature, such as biological molecules, organometallics, and polymers.
NCCT's intention is to have names generated with the most rigorous implementation of IUPAC systematic naming rules and thus our choice of the ACD/Labs products. In addition the software integrates directly with the existing deployment of ACD/Labs tools (ChemFolder and ChemSketch) that we have at NCCT. The ACD/Labs tools have been used within NCCT for over a decade and are key to the development of our DSSTox chemistry database. The products we intend to purchase are provided by the same vendor and are directly integrated in a manner that cannot be supplied through any other alternative products. Even if a comparable system did exist, attempting to integrate any other chemical name structure software with the Agency's existing systems would require a significant amount of computer programming and would result in unknown compatibility issues that would raise concerns about data integrity. The process of integration and quality assurance would be extremely expensive and the outcome would be unknown.
NO REQUEST FOR QUOTE (RFQ) IS AVAILABLE. Notwithstanding, any firm that believes it is capable of meeting EPA's requirement as stated herein may submit a capability statement by 4:30 PM EDT on October 5, 2015. Timely responses will be considered. Responses to this posting must be in writing and provide clear and convincing evidence that competition would be advantageous to the Government. A determination not to compete the proposed purchase order based upon the responses to this notice is solely within the discretion of the Government. All questions should be directed to Nicole Hairston via the e-mail link below; telephone calls will not be accepted.
The point of contact for this requirement is Nicole Hairston, Contracting Officer, at Hairston.nicole@epa.gov.
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