Leidos wins second chance at keeping $89B cancer research lab contract
Gettyimages.com/ Torsten Asmus
By
Nick Wakeman
The National Institutes of Health is asking for new proposals following the protest of the 25-year award to a University of California-led alliance.
Leidos has received a second chance at a potential $89 billion contract to work with the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research.
The company held the contract for 25 years and first won it as the "Old" Science Applications International Corp, then secured the last recompete in 2008. That was five years before Old SAIC split into two companies including Leidos.
The National Institutes of Health awarded the new 25-year version in January to the Alliance for Advancing Biomedical Research, a group created by the University of California system.
In its protest filed in March, Leidos raised concerns about how discussions were held and the evaluation of technical proposals, cost and past performance. The company also said the best-value trade-off decision was flawed.
At the time, a Leidos spokesman said the Alliance had a significantly higher price on its bid.
The Government Accountability Office's due date for a decision was July 3. But NIH is already taking a corrective action and asking for new proposals.
NIH will also conduct discussions if necessary, then make a new award decision.
The Frederick lab is a federally-funded research-and-development center and the only one focused on medical research.
Research at the Frederick lab involves cancer, AIDS/HIV, infectious diseases, biomedical imaging, data science, genetics, pathology and virology.
Work there supports the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and other parts of NIH.