ATCC, the Manassas, Virginia-based biological resource center, has been awarded a five-year, $7.3 million contract from the CDC to support influenza testing and surveillance work, under Contract 75D30126C21030. Becky Bradford, senior vice president of ATCC Federal Solutions, tied the award to the broader public health stakes of accurate flu monitoring: “Reliable serology is essential to understanding how influenza viruses evolve and how immune responses change over time. By supporting CDC’s surveillance and research activities, this work will help generate critical data for public health decision-making.”
What ATCC Will Actually Be Doing
Under the contract, ATCC will conduct hemagglutination inhibition (HAI) assays on human serum samples and help develop next-generation serology platforms for the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, Influenza Division. The work spans technical support, sample testing, and assay evaluation, all aimed at characterizing circulating and emerging influenza strains, the kind of data that feeds directly into decisions like how each year’s flu vaccine composition gets selected. Serology testing at this scale is largely invisible to the public, but it’s the underlying infrastructure that lets public health officials track how flu viruses are actually changing from season to season, rather than relying on assumptions.
Built on Two Decades of Existing CDC Work
This isn’t ATCC’s first CDC relationship. Eldar Imanverdi, senior director of business development for ATCC Federal Solutions, framed the new award as a continuation of long-standing work rather than a new relationship: “This award builds on ATCC’s more than two decades of work supporting CDC programs. We look forward to applying our scientific and operational capabilities to support this important mission.” That history includes ATCC’s role managing the CDC’s International Reagent Resource and the NIAID BEI Resources Program, both of which deliver high-volume testing and quality-controlled biological materials to support public health response efforts more broadly. This influenza-specific award is a separate contract from that existing reagent management work: it comes from the CDC rather than NIAID, and is scoped specifically to serology and surveillance rather than expanding those older reagent programs
A Manassas Institution With Roots Across Two States
ATCC has been headquartered in Manassas, Virginia since relocating there, and it also operates research and technology centers in Gaithersburg and Germantown, Maryland, giving the organization a physical footprint that spans both sides of the Potomac within the greater Washington, D.C. biotech corridor. Founded in 1925, ATCC has spent a century evolving from a traditional culture collection into the kind of federal science contractor capable of winning awards like this one, work that depends on decades of accumulated infrastructure and credibility with agencies like the CDC and NIAID. A new multimillion-dollar award for pandemic-relevant surveillance work is a reminder that some of the country’s public health testing backbone runs through organizations most people outside the field have never heard of.
