NEW YORK, July 15 (GenomeWeb News) - Information technology services firm SRA International announced today that it has been awarded a five-year contract by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to develop a Web-based database system to collect, store, and analyze data used by biomedical researchers in their study of biodefense and public health.
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The contract was awarded to SRA subsidiary Systems Research and Applications Corporation and has an estimated value of $13.6 million. The database will consolidate known information about enterobacteria, a group of pathogens that can cause dysentery, plague, food poisoning, and typhoid fever.
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NIAID, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, selected Fairfax, Va.-based SRA to develop and operate the database to enhance knowledge sharing, analyze data, and improve the quality and reuse of genomic research data, according to SRA. The SRA team includes staff from the Genome Center of the University of Wisconsin - Madison, which will advise SRA on bioinformatics tools and user interfaces.