Hoping to make patented agricultural biotechnology discoveries more available to developing nations and specialty-crop farmers, the University of California and its Davis and Riverside campuses have joined other public research institutions and organizations in establishing a new humanitarian initiative.

The new collaborative effort, called the Public-Sector Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture, was announced in the July 11 issue of the journal Science. Its goal is to provide greater access to a wide range of patented technologies needed to apply biotechnology to the development of new crops, particularly specialty crops.

"We are keenly aware of the acute needs in the developing world for improved varieties of many subsistence crops, as well as the need for better varieties of specialty crops here in the United States," said Martina Newell-McGloughlin, director of the UC Davis-based University of California Biotechnology Research and Education Program. "We're confident that this initiative will equip us to meet those needs without diminishing the commercial opportunities for this technology."

Alan Bennett, executive director of the UC Office of Technology Transfer and a UC Davis plant biologist, was one of the principal authors of this initiative, along with Deborah Delmer, former chair of plant biology and now the associate director for food security at the Rockefeller Foundation.

Historically, the nation's agricultural colleges and universities have taken the lead in developing improved crop varieties. But during the past 25 years, changes involving intellectual property rights laws have allowed for the patenting of new biotech processes, complicating the task of developing new genetically modified crop varieties.

Often the patents on technologies critical to further ag biotech research have been licensed by private companies or other public institutions. This fragmented ownership of the intellectual property rights for such research tools poses a significant barrier to other researchers who hope to apply biotechnology to develop new crops.

Currently a relatively small number of agricultural biotechnology companies have gathered the intellectual property rights for the technologies needed to develop new crops. These firms are primarily interested in developing new varieties of the major crops, such as corn and soybeans. This leaves public universities with the job of improving specialty crops that are not broadly planted in the United States or are grown as subsistence crops in the developing world.

These public research institutions, which have generated many of the basic ag biotechnology discoveries, now find themselves torn between making sure that their inventions are commercialized and the need to retain access to those inventions so that they can be used for humanitarian purposes abroad or for improving domestic specialty crops.

Intent on meeting both the commercial and public-service demands for these technologies, the new initiative will take a three-pronged approach to dealing with this problem. Its immediate objectives are to:

• Develop patenting and licensing "best practices" that will encourage the greatest commercial development of publicly funded research while also retaining rights needed for public universities to pursue research that meets the needs of developing nations and specialty-crop farmers;
• develop a public database for all patented agricultural technologies held by public institutions, including licensing information; and
• explore the possibility of creating technology "packages," composed of certain technologies whose patents are owned by public institutions, in order to make these technologies more readily available to participating institutions and to the private sector for commercial licensing or humanitarian use.

The original participants in the initiative hope that more public research institutions will join in the new effort, in order to most effectively make use of existing and future agricultural discoveries.

The new initiative was developed with leadership from the Rockefeller and McKnight Foundations. In addition to the University of California, participating institutions include North Carolina State University; Ohio State University; the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center; the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research; Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey; Michigan State University; Cornell University; University of Wisconsin-Madison; and University of Florida.