NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Northrop Grumman said on Thursday that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has chosen the company to head a team for the Bioinformatics Resource Centers for Infectious Diseases (BRC) contract.
The contract is for $4.9 million for the first year and will run through September 2019 for a total value of potentially $27 million. The award is a follow-on to the Virus Pathogen Resource/Influenza Research Database (IRD) BRC contract. In 2009, Northrop Grumman received $13 million in NIAID funding for the Bioinformatics Resource Centers, as Bioinform reported at the time.
Northrop Grumman will continue maintaining and enhancing the NIAID Bioinformatics Resource Center Virus websites as data repositories for genomic, proteomic, and other data associated with pathogenic viruses. They include influenza, Ebola, West Nile, severe acute respiratory syndrome and Middle East respiratory syndrome, enterovirus, pox, dengue, and hepatitis, the company said. It also will support an integrated analytics platform and tools for research directed at controlling and eliminating such pathogens.
A team led by Northrop Grumman, the J. Craig Venter Institute, and Vecna Technologies has managed the NIAID Virus BRC websites for the past five years and developed an integrated bioinformatics platform to support the development of vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics for pathogenic diseases, with a particular focus on influenza. Six scientists from the university research community will support the core team as co-investigators.