washington

The University of California at Berkeley (UCB) is poised to strike a unique, $50 million agreement with the Swiss drug company Novartis. The result will be that a research institute linked to the company will have first rights to a proportion of the genomics research conducted at Berkeley's Department of Plant and Microbial Biology.

The deal is expected to bring the department up to $25 million for laboratory refurbishment and a further $25 million in research support over five years, and could be signed by both parties as early as next week. It will differ from normal collaborative agreements between universities and industry because it will involve the entire department, which has 25 professors.

Berkeley will have access to gene-sequencing technology and database information on plant genomics that it would otherwise be impossible for university researchers to obtain. In return, Novartis Agricultural Discovery Institute, Inc. (NADII), a major new plant research centre being built at La Jolla, California, will get first rights to negotiate for between a quarter and a third of all the discoveries made at the department.

That fraction corresponds approximately to the proportion of the department's total research budget that will be provided by NADII. The institute is entirely funded by Novartis through a charitable foundation, although the two entities are legally independent.

According to a spokesman for UCB, the university's plant and microbial department has been seeking a corporate partner for some time, and spoke with four contenders before negotiating the deal with Novartis.

The deal has already drawn criticism from some students and staff at UCB. They say that it was drawn up in secret and could threaten academic freedom at the university. But Bob Buchanan, the chairman of the department, argues that “it doesn't impinge on academic freedom at all”.

Buchanan adds that the arrangement will bring the department the resources it needs to support graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the way that medical schools do. “The driving force for this is not the research money, but the training aspect. It will give students opportunities that we couldn't otherwise give them.”

Steven Briggs, president of NADII, says it is also seeking “one more academic alliance of similar scope” to that about to be forged with UCB.

NADII was established earlier this year, and expects to move into a new facility with up to 200 scientific staff in two years' time. The research centre is one of a spate of new ventures into plant genomics by corporations. They expect that rapid progress in the discipline will revolutionize not just agriculture but also food production and nutrition.