Public procurement notice: Prior Information Notice Without Call For Competition
Published: 2020-12-28
Buyer: Medizinische Universität Graz (MUG)
Country: AT
Contract type: Services
CPV classification: 73100000
Estimated value: 8554099.75 EUR

Technical requirements: Austrian law. This PCP is carried out by the Medical University of Graz who was appointed as lead procurer to coordinate and lead the joint procurement in the name of the buyers group.
Pre-commercial procurement (PCP) to buy R&D (research and development) services to develop fully integrated, standardized NGS workflows, for routine diagnosis of common and rare cancers.
This PIN provides early information about the expected starting date and purchase volume for a pre-commercial procurement (PCP) and about the open market consultation that is organized in preparation of this procurement. More information about the open market consultation is provided in section II.2.14).
The procurement aims to trigger new solutions to be developed and tested to address the following challenge: development of two fully integrated, standardized NGS workflows, from sample-pre-analytics to medical decision making, for routine diagnostics of common and rare cancers from adults and children.
As the common challenge exists of a number of sub-challenges, the procurement will be divided into the following lots, each corresponding to one sub-challenge:
Testing is expected to take place in the locations of the buyers group, as listed in 1.1, and at a additional test location(s), as will be defined at the OMC.
This PCP procurement is a joint procurement by different procurers across Europe that are all facing the same common challenge and are thus looking for similar solutions (so-called 'buyers group').
The procurement will take the form of a pre-commercial procurement (PCP) under which R&D service contracts will be awarded to a number of R&D providers in parallel in a phased approach. This will make it possible to compare competing alternative solutions.
Each of the 3 phases will address all 4 lots. Each supplier can address more than one lot, with a maximum of 3 lots. A minimum of different suppliers addressing the same lot per phase is: 3-4 for phase 1, 3 for phase 2 and 2 for phase 3. After each phase, intermediate evaluations will be carried out to progressively select the best of the competing solutions. The contractors with the best-value-for-money solutions will be offered a specific contract for the next phase. The phased approach with parallel contracts and intermediate evaluations will be followed within each lot. The result of phase 3 will be the development of 2 fully integrated NGS workflows with EQA.
Testing is expected to take place in the locations of the buyers (MUG, UNIFI, EMC, CCRI, UNIMIB, UKSH, CLB), as listed in 1.1, and at an additional test location: e.g. a third party located in Romania and other associated centres, as will be defined in the OMC. This testing may also serve as a first customer test reference for the contractors. The procurement is expected to start in April 2022 (M28) and end in April 2025 (M64).
The selected operators will retain ownership of the intellectual property rights (IPRs) that they generate during the PCP and will be able to use them to exploit the full market potential of the developed solutions i.e. beyond the procurement. The Global NGS market reached 7.8 billion USD in 2019 (CAGR 20.9 %), whereas the European NGS market represents ca. 25 % of the global market (around 1.95 billion USD in 2019); source Market&Markets 2019.
In order to implement NGS into routine diagnosis, a fully integrated workflow, from patient sample collection to final diagnostic result report is required. This PCP will focus on developing 4 independent lots, to be modularly integrated into two independent workflows, which could be e.g. target panel-based and/or whole genome / whole exome-based, for the diagnosis and treatment decision making (including pharmacogentics) in common cancer entities rare cancer entities. The type of workflows to be developed is not limited to the abovementioned examples, and will be decided based on the outcome of the Open Market Consultation (OMC).
In addition to introducing quality control (QC) steps for each critical part of the workflow and validating individual lots, the integrated performance of the whole workflow will be validated.
The performance improvement which this PCP aims to develop, compared to the current state-of-the art technology, is the integration of NGS data from tumor derived specimens (including liquid biopsy) with data from pharmacogenomic panels performed on non-tumor derived specimens.
The main technical challenges to be addressed per lot are specified in this prior information notice, with more information available on the project website (www.instandngs4p.eu). Adaptations, more details and further specifications will be defined based on the outcome of the OMC.


Award value: 8554099.75