The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has awarded separate contracts to Northrop Grumman [NOC] and United Technologies [UTX] to begin testing under Phase 1 of the next-generation BioWatch system called Gen-3.
Northrop Grumman’s award is for $15.1 million and UTC’s is for $14.8 million. Each contract includes options taking their respective value up to $37 million potentially over the next year.
Each company will supply 20 prototype units under the initial awards, which includes technical and operational support. If additional units are needed for further testing or more technical support is needed, then the options on the contracts will be leveraged.
The Gen-3 program is aimed at creating an automated network of biological sensors located in major urban areas around the country to provide early warning to public health officials of a potential threat. The plan basically calls for a Gen-3 system to continuously sample the local environment for threats such as anthrax and others and then automatically run tests several times throughout the day and report the results every few hours via communications links to the proper authorities.
The Gen-3 systems would replace Gen-1 and Gen-2 systems, which are basically sample collection devices that are located in more than 30 major urban areas in the U.S. that require daily, manual retrieval for analysis at a local laboratory. Results are typically produced a day or more after the actual sample was collected.
Under the new contracts the DHS Office of Health Affairs (OHA) hopes in January to begin testing the core detection technology–called the assays–of each system at Los Alamos National Laboratory to see how well they perform with live samples of the biological agents the department wants to monitor. Here OHA will want the systems to obtain a high level of sensitivity for potential threats with a low false positive rate as well as a low false negative rate.
Phase 1 Plans, Timeline
Phase 1 will also involve system and subsystem level testing against live agents at the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground and Edgewood Chemical Biological Center and the Centers for Disease Control. Finally in Phase 1, OHA will deploy Gen-3 systems in Chicago next fall to test their performance in a live environment and further develop the concept of operations with public health officials and the appropriate authorities.
Phase 1 is expected to end late next year with final test results available in Jan. 2011. Depending on how well the Northrop Grumman and UTC systems perform, OHA hopes to enter a second phase of the test program, which essentially would be an operational test and evaluation in four cites using hundreds of Gen-3 systems. The OT&E portion of the program would begin in 2012 would also feature the networked communications of the machines.
If the program does transition to OT&E, OHA will purchase hundreds of the systems.
The reason for the lag between the end of Phase 1 and the start of Phase 2 is to give the contractor or contractors selected time to take their systems from the prototype stage into production units and then ramp up production in order to be able to deliver hundreds of units, Bob Hooks, deputy assistant secretary for Weapons of Mass Destruction and Biodefense at OHA, tells TR2.
Northrop Grumman’s entry into the BioWatch competition is based on a system it had already supplied OHA that was used in an earlier pilot demonstration in New York City. The Gen-2.5 test used the Automated Pathogen Detection System for automated collection, detection and analysis of aerosol samples several times a day.
The Gen-2.5 effort ended earlier this year after about 18 months of use with the APDS when the results were no longer as reliable as OHA wanted. Hooks said over the summer that he was pleased with the APDS deployment but that ultimately DHS was looking for a system that was less expensive to operate and would analyze a wider range of pathogens.
UTC’s Hamilton Sundstrand division is teamed with Microfluidic Systems, Inc. (MFSI) and Boeing [BA] on its Gen-3 offering. The system is based on MFSI’s work with the DHS Science and Technology Directorate under the Bio-agent Autonomous Networked Detector (BAND) program.
MFSI still has several months of work left on its BAND contract. The company did a year of outdoor field trials with DHS Science and Technology, including assay tests, Allen Northrup, MFSI’s CEO tells TR2. The tests included a third party taking over the operation of the system. The assay validation testing went “extremely well,” Northrup says. The tests involved “hundreds of blind samples” and the multiplex assay “got them all right, he says.
Hamilton Sundstrand is serving as the systems integrator and will be responsible for any high volume production. Boeing’s contribution is around threat analysis, sensor placement, modeling and situational awareness and will be counted on further into the program, Northrup says.
If the Gen-3 program is successful in Phase 1, DHS can transition one or both of the companies into Phase 2 depending on how well their systems have performed, Hooks says. DHS also retains the option to allow other companies to participate in Phase 2 although the Phase 1 systems would be “strong candidates” for the OT&E, he says.
“We feel very confident that these are the two best systems that are out there that potentially could meet our Gen-3 requirements,” Hooks said.
The Gen-3 program has been beset with delays, due in part to the difficult nature of developing laboratory-in-a-box biological detection systems as well as the challenges in understanding how the state and local public health communities operate and what their requirements are.