Public procurement notice: Contract Notice
Published: 2020-07-23
Buyer: Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare
Country: FI
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Open procedure
CPV classification: 73000000 | 73111000
Estimated value: 200000 EUR
Submission deadline: 2020-08-28
Award criteria: The most economic tender

Technical requirements: Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (later referred to as ‘THL’ or ‘Customer’) invites you to submit a tender according to this call for tender and its annexes for next-generation sequencing services. This open procurement is open to all economic operators registered in the EU.
The contract period is about 2 years 2020-2022. The procurement contains two (2) option years to extend the contract for the years 2023 and 2024. Estimated total value of the procurement (including options) is  EUR 200 000.00, excluding VAT.
The contract will be awarded to one supplier based on a comparison of tenders. Tender that is economically the most advantageous will win the competition.
THL has collected and will collect more samples from natural and man-made environments and humans and extract total genomic DNA from those samples. In addition, from part of the samples, also total RNA, viral DNA and viral RNA have been or will be extracted. The objective of the procurement is to gain microbiome sequencing data from the collected samples. The microbiome targets include primarily bacteria (16S rRNA) and fungi (ITS sequence), but may also include eg. archaea, viruses or protozoa.
THL will ship the nucleic acids (DNA and/or cDNA samples) to be sequenced, typically in 15-50 μl volume, to the service provider. We will ship the samples in several batches. A typical batch size will be 100 to 500 samples, but batches may be also smaller or larger on occasion. We expect the service provider to store the remainder of the sample batch for possible later sequencing up to 1 year and/or communicate with THL returning unused nucleic acids. We also expect the service provider to discuss in detail PCR and sequencing conditions for each batch to be processed beforehand. Post PCR and prior to sequencing, we request agarose gel pictures (or comparable technique) with sample identification that are used to decide on success of PCR amplification of the sample DNA.
The exact total number of samples or the total number of batches per each amplicon target (bacteria, fungi, others) is not known. All batches will contain at least one negative and one positive control (mock community) sample. In total, we are anticipating to request bacterial and fungal amplicon sequencing service of several batches between 100 and 500 samples within the first 12 months and similar throughput for following years.
The subject of procurement and the mandatory requirements relating to it are described in detail in this call for tender and its annexes.
The procurement contains two (2) option years to extend the contract. The customer can extend the contract 1 or 2 year at a time. The customer will notify the decision of extension three (3) months before the previous contract period expires.
The procurement contains two (2) option years to extend the contract. Please see section II.2.7) and part Description of renewals.
Tenderers may ask clarification questions using the Supplier Portal. The questions must be in English and will be answered in English. To guarantee the equal treatment of tenderers, questions posed in any other way cannot be answered.
Please note that the online connection to the supplier portal is periodically slow and the download time will take time. Please fill out the tenders information in good time before the deadline expires.


Award value: 200000