Public procurement notice: Voluntary Ex Ante Transparency Notice
Published: 2019-03-06
Buyer: The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trusts
Country: UK
Contract type: Supplies
Procedure: Contract award without prior publication
CPV classification: 33100000

Technical requirements: The NextSeq 550Dx instrument is an FDA-regulated and CE-marked IVD platform that delivers the power of high-throughput next-generation sequencing (NGS) with the affordability of a benchtop system. This instrument includes a Diagnostic Mode and a Research Mode, which provides the flexibility to perform IVD testing, LDT development, and clinical research on a single platform. For large clinical laboratories, the NextSeq 550Dx instrument offers a validated high-throughput platform and provides access to an ever-expanding pipeline of clinical applications in the fields of oncology.
NextSeq 550Dx instrument can generate more than 90 Gb of data in less than two days, delivers the consistency of a regulated platform and includes robustness improvements in software and instrument design. In addition, running in Research Mode supports all currently available research applications including exome sequencing, transcriptome profiling, customer designed targeted panels, and microarray scanning.
Purchase of Illumina NextSeq 550Dx Sequencing System with installation and training and 60 months warranty including parts and labour and reagents.
Purchase of Illumina NextSeq 550Dx Warranty Upgrade: Silver Support Plan. Includes full coverage for parts, labour, and travel; Reagent replacement upon HW failures; 1 PM; Remote Technical Support 18x5; 2 business day on-site response target*; control SW and HW updates; on-site applications support; discounts on advanced training; remote monitoring available.
Purchase of Illumina NextSeq 550Dx Silver Support Plan for 4 additional years of extended warranty. Includes full coverage for parts, labour, and travel; Reagent replacement upon HW failures; 1 PM; Remote Technical Support 18x5; 2 business day on-site response target*; control SW and HW updates; on-site applications support; discounts on advanced training; remote monitoring available.
The Centre for Molecular Pathology (CMP) provides clinical grade high throughput sequencing facilities to the Royal Marsden Hospital (RMH), the NHS, and via the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), to many research organisations. They have recently been awarded the tender to be the NHS England genomic lab hub for diagnostic cancer genomic testing for North/West London. The CMP has two Illumina Miseq benchtop systems, one existing Illumina Nextseq500 benchtop system, and an Illumina Novaseq6000 system in the laboratory. The Illumina machines have been a success, and are now heavily used. The existing Illumina Nextseq500 system has exceeded capacity and is 50 % owned by ICR for clinical trial projects including pediatric SMPeads study. The Illumina Novaseq6000 has very high capacity, but the CMP also has the requirement for another intermediate capacity sequencer, the Illumina NextSeq550Dx system, with which small gene panels can be run with a suitable balance of turnaround time and cost. More importantly, the CMP also needs an accredited diagnostic (Dx) instrument which can be used with CE-Marked assay workflows, to allow the participation in international trials, and as we move closer to a period of more stringent regulations in view of IVDR. In H2 2019 Illumina will have the first high throughout comprehensive genomic profiling workflow for NGS that will be IVD compliant, which can only be run on the Illumina NextSeq550Dx system. For diagnostic labs, not having this is going to be problematic. No other current instrument of this type exists with a Dx accreditation.
The CMP’s existing standard operating procedures (SOP’s) have been developed over several years to be optimised for the Illumina chemistry. Adopting new technology at this time would take a great deal of effort, and would cause considerable disruption and inefficiency. The Illumina Nextseq550Dx system is completely compatible with all of the CMP’s workflows and offers minimal disruption. The Illumina NextSeq550Dx is essential for interactions in developing Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) workflows that can be implemented in the clinic for direct diagnostic and prognostic application.
A translational research lab like the CMP searching for rare single base variants cannot function with a less accurate system. The Illumina NextSeq550Dx system has unrivalled, extremely high sequencing accuracy of > 75 % of bases with Q scores > 30 (2 x 150 bp).


Winner: Illumina Centre