Public Health Preparedness and Response
The American public continually confronts medical events such as emerging infectious diseases, terrorist threats, or natural disasters. Several federal agencies participate collaboratively and unilaterally within their mission space in building contingency plans and executing programs that address these potential events; from prevention of the events to active response engagement. Tunnell Government Services (TGS) supports several of these agencies through our biomedical scientific understanding of the threats, our expertise in preventative and therapeutic product life cycle development, and our experience in consequence management procedures. As noted below, our capabilities range from early identification of threats to final manufacturing and distribution cold chain management to ultimate storage at user’s locations.
- Epidemiological studies to identify threat severity and characteristics as well as response program effectiveness
- Laboratory characterization of threats
- Marketplace assessments of available countermeasure technologies – both FDA approved or in development
- Intelligence services to monitor political and scientific environment to identify and target threats
- Epidemiological studies to identify threat severity and characteristics as well as response program effectiveness
- Requirements generation / definition
- Medical product development life cycle support
- Medical product logistics management
- Program evaluation and improvement
- Critical manufacturing infrastructure support
- Interagency support and participation
- Health policy and clinical practice development
The primary interagency group that supports this effort is the Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasures Enterprise (PHEMCE), a formal group led by the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response within the Department of Health and Human Services. We are proud that we have been supporting many of these agencies over the past eight years of our federal contract existence. As noted below, we provide contractual support to many of these agencies in their fulfillment of this mission.
- DHHS, ASPR: Planning, requirements generation, and epidemiologically based program analysis.
- BARDA: Project management, biomedical sciences support, clinical affairs and trial oversight, manufacturing engineering, regulatory and quality assurance services, and logistical planning.
- NIH, NIAID: Laboratory sciences for threat characterization and medical countermeasure discovery/testing.
- DHS, S&T: Project management for chemical and biological defense and subject matter expertise for biological threat characterization
- DoD: Research management in infectious diseases, regenerative medicine and trauma care
- PHEMCE Working Group/Committee participation: CBRN and Influenza groups