By Calvin Biesecker
Just as the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) program to advance the detection of, and response to, harmful biological pathogens in the nation’s major urban areas appears to be getting on track, the House says its concerns with the BioWatch program are worsening and that it is losing patience with the ongoing development.
“The committee is losing patience with the development of next generation systems and must take action to ensure that the taxpayers’ dollars are spent judiciously,” House appropriators say in a report accompanying their version of the FY ’10 Homeland Security Appropriations bill that was approved by the full House last week. The appropriators also say that the fact that a spending plan from the DHS Office of Health Affairs (OHA) regarding the baseline and next-generation systems, known as Gen-3, that was due late last year still hasn’t been submitted.
This “leads to the conclusion that OHA is directionless in its management of this program,” the House says. “It is unthinkable that OHA cannot provide the committee with a complete reporting of its base program, which consists of Generation 1 and 2, after two years of steady state.”
The Gen-1 and Gen-2 versions of BioWatch have been deployed to the nation’s major urban areas for several years. The systems consist of collectors that draw in air for samples. The samples are retrieved manually on a daily basis and then taken to a local laboratory for subsequent analysis. Not only is the process manpower intensive and expensive, it is slow, with results often taking longer than a day to be completed.
Under the Gen-3 program, DHS plans to automate the detection and alerting functions–basically a laboratory in a box–allowing for potential alerts several times per day based on repeated sample collections. If successful, the Gen-3 systems would not only allow for responses to be taken closer to when a potential harmful pathogen was released into the atmosphere, it wouldn’t require daily ritual associated with having someone remove the sample from the collector and transporting it to the lab.
In late May, OHA released a long awaited Request for Proposal (RFP) for the Gen-3 systems (Defense Daily, May 29). OHA plans to select one or more proposals for demonstrations that could begin in early July to see whether a system is mature enough to receive a contract to enter into a test and evaluation phase of the program.
OHA’s goal is to move out quickly with the systems it deems acceptable. The agency hopes to begin testing before summer is out. The testing of bio-detectors would take place in the laboratory and also in operationally relevant scenarios to determine suitability for eventual procurement and deployment.
Based on the results of the tests, OHA eventually hopes to release a second RFP leading to operational test and evaluation of the Gen-3 production systems, full-rate production, deployment and operations and maintenance.
The House bill provides $79.4 million for BioWatch in FY ’10, a $15.1 million cut to the program. The House says that Gen-3 testing funded in the FY ’09 budget has fallen short of expectations and requires further testing. Moreover, the report directs OHA to turn testing over to DHS’ Science and Technology (S&T) directorate, where the $15.1 million removed from OHA would be used for the Gen-3 testing.
In its markup of the Homeland Security Appropriations Bill, Senate appropriators cut the $89.5 million BioWatch request by $5 million. The money is for maintaining the Gen-1 and Gen-2 systems and completing Gen-3 prototype field testing, data analysis and verification of the performance of the technology.
DHS S&T has been responsible for the initial development and testing of the Gen-3 systems. The plan has been for OHA to take over the program when the technology is ready to advance to the operational test and production stages.
Three companies have been involved in Gen-3 development although only one received a contract to transition to field testing, Microfluidic Systems, Inc. Of the other two companies, IQuum and U.S. Genomics, the latter continues to do laboratory testing but remains one or two iterations away from transitioning its product to field testing, the company says.
Northrop Grumman [NOC] participated in BioWatch with a Gen-2.5 system that provided an automatic alerting capability. However, that pilot project was terminated this year when its reliability came into question despite working well for about 18 months up to that point. The company is expected to offer its system, with upgrades, in the Gen-3 competition.