Mike Lee
The Sacramento Bee, California via Agnet May 1/04
Knight-Ridder Tribune

UC Davis will lead a nationwide effort to expand the benefits of biotechnology to developing countries and small farmers whose crops don't attract much interest from big companies.

In July, the University of California- Davis, becomes home to an initiative called the Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture. PIPRA is a collection of about 20 universities and philanthropic groups that united last summer to overcome the legal barriers that slow development of biotech crops.

PIPRA is funded by the McKnight Foundation of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Rockefeller Foundation of New York. The cost for the first three to five years of PIPRA is pegged at approximately $1 million.

Officials at UC Davis - chosen from among four possible sites - embraced PIPRA as an important part of the university's educational and research mission.

Alan Bennett, a UC intellectual property specialist, will lead PIPRA during its first year.

PIPRA was formed last summer by some of the nation's leading academics to address legal barriers that have emerged over the past two decades. Private companies have patented huge volumes of genes and licensed fundamental tools for creating biotech crops.

The net effect, wrote PIPRA founders: "Although many significant discoveries and technologies have been generated with public funding, these discoveries are no longer accessible as 'public goods.'"

The formation of PIPRA underscores interest in developing biotech crops important in poor countries, where companies have little incentive to operate, and in places like California, where biotech companies have blocked the use of their technology for specialty crops.

Said Bennett: "With the level of genomics research that is going on, there are going to be a large number of new discoveries and PIPRA wants to be positioned and available to work with those technologies as they emerge."
In coming months, the project will focus on cataloging publicly owned biotech tools for university researchers. A one-stop shop also will benefit companies by making it easier to find who owns specific inventions they might want to use.

Bennett also aims to broaden university participation and to integrate more intellectual property issues into the UC Davis curriculum.