The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) seeks a contractor to address the present and anticipated future needs of NIAAA's Medication Development Program. The Division of Neuroscience and Behavior's (DNB) Preclinical Medication Efficacy Testing Program seeks to re-compete a contract for the blind testing of reference compounds and proprietary compounds on alcohol drinking in mice using models of various aspects of alcohol dependence. The contract will use mechanisms having intellectual property conditions favorable to compound providers. This will eliminate a major barrier to testing optimized compounds having preclinical, as well as clinical toxicology data, and will stimulate interest by the pharmaceutical industry in developing high quality, marketable compounds for alcoholism. Overall, the contractor will assess effects of proprietary compounds in standardized models of alcohol dependence-induced alcohol intake using mice for subjects. Specifically, the contractor will be required to test effects of compounds submitted to them by NIAAA staff members in voluntary limited-access 2 bottle choice drinking of unsweetened ethanol solutions in mice made dependent through repeated cycles of ethanol vapor exposure and withdrawal. The contractor will also develop and implement testing of proprietary compounds in additional mouse models, which may include drinking in the dark (DID), intermittent access drinking model, alcohol deprivation model (ADE), and conditioned place preference (CPP) models. The contractor will also collect, analyze and display data from these tests and report them to designated NIAAA personnel. The data generated by this contract will be used in the identification of compounds for further development. Capability statements must conform to the Response Guidelines stated herein and should demonstrate a respondent's qualifications and experience, specifically providing evidence of their capability to perform the following requirements: www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=9a3afcb0812bbb2f105da81b112b728d&tab=core&_cview=0
