Public procurement notice: Prior Information Notice Without Call For Competition
Published: 2019-12-24
Buyer: Genomics England
Country: UK
Contract type: Services
CPV classification: 48000000 | 48100000 | 71600000 | 71621000 | 72000000

Technical requirements: As part of 100 000 Genome Project, Genomics England Ltd (‘Genomics England’) established a secure research environment targeting the following outcomes:
With sights now set on 5 000 000 genomes in 5 years, Genomics England has been reviewing its strategic approach to deliver and operate a next-generation Trusted Research Environment (‘TRE’). To date Genomics England has relied primarily on internal resourcing to maintain the research environment. Moving forward Genomics England seeks to establish a strategic partnership (‘the Partnership’) that invests in, delivers, develops and maintains a secure, easy to use and collaborative TRE.
Genomics England is looking for a strategic partner to help develop a TRE using innovative commercial and funding models designed using open and transparent interaction.
The goal of the TRE is to enable benefits to patients, healthcare professionals and researchers. It is our expectation that potential partners will be able invest resource and assets in the co-development of the TRE, in a way that is sustainable for them over time. It is not expected that a traditional buyer and supplier contracting relationship will meet the strategic direction envisaged, therefore, the perceived benefits to potential partners will be explored to ensure long term viability of the TRE partnership.
In order to derive the greatest benefit from the strategic partnership in terms of the TRE delivery and viability it is likely that a partnership agreement of 5 to 10 years would be required, maybe in different forms. Genomics England are looking for a single partner in the delivery of the TRE and are open to discuss various proposals as to the structure of the strategic relationship.
The design, development and operation of the TRE are driven by its objective to provide a secure and collaborative workspace that enables researchers and industry to perform genomic data analysis to accelerate scientific discovery for the benefit of patients.
The scope of the project is to partner with an organisation to deliver and operationalise a TRE that includes:
— a unified data platform containing datastores appropriate for all the required clinical and genomic data types,
— data integration capability to deliver analytics-ready datasets into domain-specific data stores across batch and streaming integration patterns,
— standards-based access services providing secure, fast, flexible and robust access to TRE data assets,
— applications to support the research user journey from an exploration of data sets, through cohort building, analysis and publication — providing tools appropriate to a variety of user requirements (ways of working) and programming competency.
‘an intuitive, integrated and collaborative user experience, ensuring user satisfaction and engagement; providing a user experience that supports the journey of a wide range of research personas, with various levels of technical competency.’
1) Software and infrastructure that meet functional, security, governance, capacity and performance requirements of the TRE;
2) Technology providing the usability, availability, accessibility, flexibility, interoperability and scalability required by both academic and commercial users.
3) Solutions that drive a standardised approach to data governance, consent practices, data release and other relevant policies and processes;