Awarded without open competition
Awarded without open competition. The buyer went directly to one or a few suppliers instead of advertising the contract. Procurement rules allow this only in specific cases, such as extreme urgency, when only one supplier can do the work, or for call-offs from an existing framework.
Key facts
- Buyer
- University Of Edinburgh · Body governed by public law
- Supplier
- New England Biolabs
- Value
- £335,000
- Procedure
- Award procedure without prior publication of a call for competition
- Sector
- Medical equipment & pharmaceuticals · Laboratory reagents (CPV 33696500)
- Region
- Scotland
- Official notice
- 017076-2026 on Find a Tender
- Timeline
-
- Contract date25 Feb 2026
- Published25 Feb 2026Published the same day
Description
The University of Edinburgh intends to award a contract to New England Biolabs (NEB) to provide products for the library preparation of samples ahead of sequencing on Oxoford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) equipment. The NEB reagents are the only products validated, qualified, and optimized by ONT for the library preparation protocol. Substituting these critical reagents would require full revalidation, introducing risks to workflow stability and data comparability. Although multiple suppliers offer general molecular biology reagents, no alternative vendor meets the validated compatibility requirements for the current ONT workflows in this project. NEB is therefore the only acceptable source for the products for library preparation for this project. Based on validation data, workflow compatibility, and compliance requirements, NEB is the single source capable of supplying reagents required for the ONT sequencing processes defined in the project. These products are not available from othe…
About the supplier
New England Biolabs: every public contract they have won.