Award of contract for spatial sequencing platform - University of Aberdeen

Award of contract for spatial sequencing equipment without seeking offers through a formal procurement procedure as competition is absent for technical reasons. Under clause 33 (1)(b)(ii) of the legislation, a contracting authority may award a contract without competition (only where no reasonable alternative or substitute exists, and the absence of competition is not the result of artificial narrowing down of parameters of the procurement). In this case, the grounds for not exposing to competition are as follows: The equipment provided by the supplier is the only one which can meet the research requirements and is the only instrument on the market capable of: Spatially resolving both protein and RNA targets, in FFPE and Fresh Frozen tissues, and using the same chemistry and workflow (in-situ, oligo-barcodes which are photocleaved from the target transcript). Capacity to perform the above in a manner non-destructive to the tissue, enabling the use of precious samples for follow-on experiments. Capacity work with Tissue Microarray (TMA) Format which is required for a pilot study to spatially profile distinct tissue regions (GFAP, NeuN, Iba1) from 96 patient brain tissues on just one slide.