Morpho Detection, Inc., a United States-based business unit of France’s Safran Group, on Nov. 25 filed a protest challenging the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) potential $162 million contract earlier in the month with Implant Sciences Corp. [IMSC] to provide the agency with explosive trace detectors for aviation security screening.
Implant Sciences said on Nov. 26 it had been informed of the bid protest with the Government Accountability Office, which expects to rule on the matter by March 5, 2015.
“We are confident that our award will be upheld and that we will be able to ship a significant number of these systems in our current fiscal year,” Darryl Jones, vice president of Global Sales and Marketing with Implant Sciences, said in a statement.
Morpho Detection, in a statement provided for HSR, said that after receiving a “debrief from TSA on the contract award process and criteria, MD believes the Itemiser DX offers the best value over the course of the contract.”
The TSA award for Implant Sciences’ QS-B220 desktop ETD system, which utilizes a non-radioactive source, was the first time the company had received an award from the agency for its ETD system. Previously TSA has only bought ETD’s from Morpho Detection and Britain’s Smiths Detection.
The initial award to Implant Sciences was for $21.6 million. Implant Sciences, which has a lumpy sales history, previously has received multi-million dollar contracts from agencies in China and India but never one as large as the TSA order, which it called an “inflection point” for the company.
Both Morpho Detection and Smiths Detection recently introduced ETD systems with non-radioactive sources.