Page 3 of 3 Page 1 of 3 Pre-Solicitation Notice for the notice of intent to award a sole source contract. This is not a solicitation. Regional Procurement Office (RPO) - East intends to negotiate a sole source contract for one (1) year with NOVOGENE CORPORATION INC, located at 2921 Stockton Blvd Ste 1810, Sacramento, California, 95817-2305, for the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System for its multi-omics sequencing and analysis services to support VA-funded study. Background: Degenerative cervical myelopathy (DCM) is the most common cause of spinal cord dysfunction and poses a significant health burden in Veterans. However early detection is a significant challenge, leading to the current study aimed at identifying diagnostic biomarkers that will inform treatment more targeted and individualized treatment strategies. This study will employ three different discovery-based untargeted omics tools to identify blood metabolites, circulating plasma proteins, and global transcriptional profiles of blood cells. Scope of Work: The current study is a multi-omics project with the following unique restraints: (1) small pilot funding (less than 50K for the entire project), (2) short-time frame (pilot funding is received and must be used within the same fiscal year, by September 30, 2026), and the lab performing the study is a clinical research lab that is uniquely situated to recruit and evaluate the specific Veteran population but lacking in the necessary equipment and skill sets (high-order wet lab molecular biology and biochemistry expertise that is required to perform initial sample processing in-house and bioinformatics expertise needed for data analysis). A fourth complication is the inherent variability in sample processing of a relatively small number of patients (no room for removal of outliers) and fact that each omics type must be comparable across samples collected at different time points based on pre-operative scheduling. Briefly, the basic workflow is that multiple blood samples will be collected from each patient (n=40) using blood tubes specific for each of the three omics types (to preserve the specific molecule types for each) - which will be a total of 120 samples that will be stored until ready for processing. They must all be processed together in one large batch to allow for comparability, and the sheer number alone makes doing initial steps in-house impossible for this clinical lab. A high throughput core or company is thus required as a matter of reasonable logistics. We reached out to several different cores at the University of Pittsburgh. These cores do not accept blood samples. We would need to perform the preprocessing of each sample ourselves, which as stated above is not feasible. There is also no single core to perform all three omics, and none of the omics cores can perform the post-analysis required to transform the numbers into meaningful scientific findings that we ca then interpret in the context of clinical relevance. We none…